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CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 



REV. IIEXRY A. BRAM, D.D. 

n 



NEWARK, N. J. : 
J. J. O'OOMOS & CO. 59 AND 61 NEW STREET. 

18G6. 



HI* 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by 

J. J. O'CONNOR & CO., 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the 
District of New-Jersey. 



TO THE 

VERT REV. T. J. O'MAHONY, D.D., D.C.L., 

AS A 

PLEDGE OF FRIENDSHIP 

WHICH TIME OR DISTANCE CAN NOT CHANGE, 

t$K\$ Booh 1$ $o3icatoti 



f 



R E F A C E 



This book has been written with the hope of do- 
ing some good. The author, in reading the works 
of American writers, has observed that their errors 
arise from a lack of first principles, from a defect 
in their primary education. Those who read the 
following questions will find that, for the most 
part, they treat of all that is most difficult and at 
the same time most essential in human knowledge. 
When the first principles are correct, errors are 
rare. Logic, and natural humility, which con- 
sists in the consciousness of the mind's weakness, 
render man infallible. 

The book might be longer and better. It will 
be longer if it meet with an appreciation sufficient 
to encourage the author. Abler and more ex- 
perienced pens must make it better. There are 
many who have the ability to aid our literature ; 



vi PREFACE. 

yet indolence or excess of modesty restrains their 
pen. They forget that, although it is better to 
write no book than a bad one, it is better to have 
a book of mediocrity, to supply a want or help a 
cause, than none at all. We must all work ; we 
must all strive to fulfill our mission in the plan of 
creation. Hence, if we can write a book that 
may do good, natural or supernatural, we should 
not hesitate even though the purity of our mo- 
tives should be suspected. 

The author wishes to say but one word in con- 
clusion, to propitiate the critics. No one will be 
more delighted than he to find that his critic has 
written a better book than this. The author 
wishes to evoke the thoughts of others as well as 
express his own. In the friction of minds there 
must be scintillations of light, and intellectual 
light is truth. 

Foht Lee, August 15, 1S66. 



p 



ONTENTS. 



PAGB 

Introduction. 

Chapter I. — The Utility of Philosophy, . , • . 9 

Chapter II. — Philosophical Terms, • , , » , 29 

Question First. 
What is Science ?......».... 87 

Question Second. 
What Relation has Philosophy to other Sciences ? . . . . 53 

Question Third. 
What is the Difference between Mental and Oral Terms ? . . .65 

Question Fourth. 
What is the Criterion of Certitude ? Degrees of Certitude, . . 70 

Question Fifth. 
What is the True Notion of an Idea? 75 

Question Sixth. 
Is Idea a Possible Being, or an Existing One ? System of Rosmini, 85 

Question Seventh. 
What Kind of Existence has Idea ? System of Gioberti, ... 99 

Question Eighth. 
Does the Intellect apprehend Contingent Facts ? . . . . 130 

Question Ninth. 
What is Meant by the History and Solution of the Controversy con- 
cerning the Universals ? . 138 



Vlll CONTENTS. 

PAOB 

Question Tenth. 
"What is the Difference between the Direct and Reflex State of Uie 

Soul ? • . lo3 

Question Eleventh. 
Does God Exist ? 109 

Question Twelfth. 
Is God's Existence Identified with the Existence of other Beings ? 167 

Question Thirteenth. 
What is Beauty in Art? 193 

Question Fourteenth. 

Does Beauty Consist in Magnitude or Exaggeration ? In Illusion or 

Imitation? 214 

Question Fifteenth. 

Does Beauty Consist in Proportion and Order of Parts or in Unity 

and Variety ? 224 

Question Sixteenth. 
Is the Beautiful the " Splendor Veri " as Plato defines^? • • 235 

Question Seventeenth. 
Are there but two Real Causes in the World — Man and God ? . . 251 

Question Eighteenth. 
Why is the Spirit of the Age Anti-Christian and Anti-Philosophic ? 251 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 




Introduction. 

CHAPTER I. 
THE UTILITY OF PHILOSOPHY. 

|E live in a most unphilosophical 
age: principles are despised, 
and iniquity respected. In re- 
ligion, in government, in the family circle, 
all is confusion. Sects swarm, and tear 
Christianity into bits like ants with a 
crumb ; some of them destroy not only 
revealed religion, but reject even tlie law 
of nature. Political heresies brood among 
the nations. Robbery is applauded on 
the ground of expediency; rebellion is 
justified in the press, and shows itself 
boldly on the field of battle; plots for 



10 INTRODUCTION. 

the overthrow of established thrones, 
round which grow the moss of centuries, 
are hatched in the countless secret socie- 
ties of Europe and America. The family 
tie has been broken by the civil laws in 
admitting divorce; the state in this case 
showing the corruption of the citizens, for 
the state is sound so long as its members 
are incorrupt. Children, in consequence 
of social vices, have been dragged from 
their mothers' arms, and allowed to grow 
up ignorant of true principles ; their minds 
warped from their natural bent to good- 
ness by the example of fathers without 
religion, or mothers without virtue. The 
age is illogical ; unreasonable in its insti- 
tutions, for it eschews religion in its edu- 
cation, allows the extreme of tyranny and 
licentiousness in its civil governments, and 
consequently, partially if not completely 
ignores the immutable principles of the 
natural law. Such a diseased state of 
human society cries out for a remedy, Re- 
ligion is [hat remedy, and after religion 



INTRODUCTION. 11 

sound philosophy. We say sound philoso- 
phy, for the aberrations of the Germans 
of modern times have done harm instead 
of good. The philosophy of Kant, Fichte, 
and Schelling, imported into France by 
Victor Cousin and Ernest Renan, and 
sown broadcast in Italy by the pantheists, 
has been wafted on the wings of the winds 
to our own land. It has taken root, and 
its fruits are an unprincipled press, fanat- 
icism, and general unbelief. The Christian 
philosopher must try to do his part in 
healing these eye-sores of modern times. 
It is a duty he owes to his God and to 
his fellow-beings; he is bound to be an 
active member of society, influencing its 
thought ; not a mere passive spectator of 
the scenes enacted on the world's theatre. 
Hence, he must study sound philosophy, 
and hence one of the great advantages of 
intellectual philosophy, so often sneered 
at and so much neglected in our schools. 
It is our intention, in this preliminary 
chapter, to expose the utility of this sci- 



12 INTRODUCTION. 

ence, that the reader may be induced 
the more zealously to apply himself to 
the acquiring of a perfect mastery of 
it. In order, therefore, that we may pro- 
ceed with greater clearness, we shall di- 
vide our remarks into three parts. In 
the first we shall speak of the utility 
of this study considered with regard 
to the subject-matter of which it treats. 
In the second we shall discourse of its 
importance, subjectively considered, as a 
means of mental culture; and in the 
third we shall glance at it as relating to 
revealed religion and smoothing the way 
to theology, being in this respect the 
footstool of faith and the handmaid of 
religion. 

Sec. 1. The utility of Philosophy shown 
from the nature of the matter of which it 
treats. 

What is the object of philosophical re- 
search? It is God, the world, and man. 
There is a great part of this science that 



INTRODUCTION. 13 

treats of the existence, nature, and attri- 
butes of the Divinity. The whole of 
Theodicy has no other scope than to prove 
the existence of God and explain his at- 
tributes. Now, no one will deny the im- 
portance of this part of intellectual phi- 
losophy ; for what is of more importance 
than the knowledge of God ? God is the 
Being of beings, the Creator of all things, 
and man's final cause. To know such a 
being is important to man. He was made 
for no other being but God, he tends to 
God as to his centre. God is the sun of 
his planetary system; hence the utility 
of studying a science that makes of God 
a special study; that investigates the na- 
ture of the Divinity, examines his infinite 
perfections, his goodness, omnipotence, 
and immensity. The advantages to be 
derived from such a study are manifest ; 
for by knowing our Creator better we 
love him more, and are more inclined to 
aim at possessing Him. Now, the posses- 
sion of the end for which we were formed 



14: INTRODUCTION. 

is that which is most important to us ; 
therefore, the study of intellectual philoso- 
phy which helps us to arrive at the term 
of our existence is of the greatest import- 
ance to us. The second object of which 
our science treats is the universe. The 
world of possibilities, which is the world 
of ideas, cosmology describes and en- 
deavors to explain. This world is the 
link that binds us and God together; for 
other beings have their proximate end in 
man, though their last end, like that of 
man himself, must be God. To know the 
means of arriving at our end, to know 
the reason of the existence of other beings 
around us, is of great utility and advan- 
tage to us. We must always in these 
matters go on the hypothesis that nothing 
is useful or advantageous to man which 
docs not tend either mediately or immedi- 
ately to the end for which he was created. 
For what is meant by the word useful, if 
no( apt for a purpose? Usefulness, then, 
supposes a purpose — an end in the acquisi- 



INTRODUCTION. 15 

tion of which useful things are employed. 
Hence, to man nothing is useful but what 
leads to his final end, to which all other 
ends are subservient, and compared with 
which they are secondary. Now creatures 
are made to serve man, to aid him in 
knowing his Creator. St. Augustine, a 
great philosopher, says that moral de- 
formity consists in endeavoring to enjoy 
what is only meant to be used, " frui 
utendis et uti fruendis." When we know 
creatures and their causes we know the 
greatness of their Creator, as well as their 
own littleness better. Besides this there 
is a great benefit derived from the know- 
ledge of creatures ; we know their exact 
worth ; they can not, therefore, cheat us ; 
and this, certainly, is a very useful know- 
ledge. The poet has said, " Felix qui po- 
test rerum cognoscere causas," and he said 
truly ; for, besides the incontestable plea- 
sure derived from such examinations in 
the satisfaction of our intellectual curi- 
osity, the utility also is very great, as we 



16 INTRODUCTION. 

have shown ; great because of tlie char- 
acter of means which the universe bears 
in our relation to God ; great, also, on ac- 
count of the subjective improvement of 
our intellectual capacities. And here we 
touch on the third great utility of philoso- 
phy, considered in relation to the objects 
of which it treats. There is a very exten- 
sive part of our science which treats of 
the soul and its faculties, and, taken even 
in its more general sense, which treats of 
man's body also. Logic and psychology 
in a special manner deal with human 
thought, and the different operations of 
the mind. The old philosophers said that 

science Consisted in the yvoOe deov tcai ceavrov, 

a the knowledge of God and of our- 
selves." Now, both these parts of science 
are embraced by philosophy. Self-know- 
ledge is very important for all. It is use- 
ful to know our failings and our strength, 
so that we may not be tempted to go lx k - 
yond it. Now, to know our strength, we 
study in philosophy tin? character of our 



INTRODUCTION*. 17 

mental faculties, and their ways of work- 
ing ; tlie mechanism of the mind, and the 
play of the passions. Psychology and 
logic are mental anatomy. "We fathom 
the depth of our intellect, and learn to 
distrust its shallows and quicksands ; we 
feel the pulse of the will, to learn wheth- 
er it be feverish and wayward, or firm 
and resolute. We drag our imagination 
to the bar of reason and interrogate it as 
to its intentions, so that it may not hur- 
riedly lead us astray before reflection has 
time to recall it to the right path. Man's 
mind is a kingdom which philosophy ex- 
amines, classifying its products, arranging 
in order its powers, as a geologist places 
fossils in a cabinet. Knowledge is power ; 
and hence the knowledge we acquire of 
ourselves by the philosophical examina- 
tion of the faculties of the soul gives us a 
better appreciation of our own ability. 
In a word, if we reflect for a moment on 
the character of the objects with which 
philosophy deals, taking reason as the 



18 INTRODUCTION". 

judge, we shall charge strongly for the 
utility of the science. Nor .will the result 
be otherwise if we examine the question 
of the utility of philosophy from the 
subjective point of view. 

Sec. 2. The importance of tlxe study 
of Intellectual Philosophy as a means of 
intellectual culture. 

Those who are best able to judge of 
the utility of our science place it the last 
in the course of classical education. The 
reason is obvious, because it is the crown- 
ing science of all — it caps the climax of 
elementary education. It is the scientia 
scientiarum, the basis of all, and it runs 
through all, for it is the science of reason, 
and reason is necessary everywhere. The 
boy, after having gone through his clas- 
sics and the greater part of his mathe- 
matical studies, is gradually being trans- 
formed into a man. lie now needs a 
greater aid in controlling his passions than 
heretofore. Though grace is more than 



INTRODUCTION. 19 

sufficient, still lie must not disdain to use 
her handmaid, Nature. Hence, the science 
of reason as well as of faith is imparted 
to him, till his mind becomes inoculated 
with right principles. The play of his 
fancy is checked, the waywardness of his 
will controlled, and the reluctance of his 
intellect to meditate overcome by con- 
stant application to the study of matter, 
which brings out all the reflective pow- 
ers. His mind is drilled by syllogisms 
daily ; he argues ; he proposes his thesis, 
lays down his premises, and draws his 
conclusions according to rule, as an archi- 
tect builds a mansion. He had been ac- 
customed to think as the ostrich flies, by 
fits and starts ; now his reasoning is close, 
connected, solid. Heretofore there was 
an exaggerated growth of the imagina- 
tion apparent in his style; weeds grew 
along with flowers ; now his judgment 
assumes the office of pruner. The style 
becomes chaster and more elegant. He 
has passed from being an author of bom- 



20 INTRODUCTION. 

bastic verses to being the writer of sound 
prose ; and if lie still preserves tlie charac- 
ter of a poet, his productions are more 
labored and exact. 

There is more common-sense appearing 
in him as his reason improves under logi- 
cal discipline and metaphysical drill. 
He obeys more readily, for the principles 
he is imbibing influence his will. Excep- 
tions there may be to this rule, but the 
exceptions prove the rule here as well as 
in many other cases. 

In fact, the improvement of his intel- 
lect, will, and imagination is apparent. 
His intellect grows robust, it seizes great 
difficulties by the hair, it dives into 
abysses, scales precipices, it has the 
6oa ttov ot& of Archimedes, nothing can 
shake it, and it can move the world. The 
intellect becomes more impartial, it ex- 
amines both sides of questions, acquires a 
love of justice, stability, and strength, and 
loves to see them everywhere, in religion 
a i well as in go vernment. The thoughts be- 



INTRODUCTION. 21 

come clear — for philosophy is an intellec- 
tual clarifier — the conceptions exact, and 
the expression of the thought more just, 
according to the rule of Boileau : " Ce qui 
se con§oit bien s'enonce clairernent." 
Clearness of expression is a consequence 
of clearness of thought. On the will, it 
(our science) produces similar effects, for 
volition generally follows the intellect. 
Mental conviction is the next step to per- 
suasion. The young man's ardor is not 
quenched by our science, but tempered. 
We had seen more of the animal in the 
boy and child; philosophy brings out 
the rational, so that we finally have the 
definition of the metaphysicians proved : 
" Homo est animal rationale." The effect 
of serious study on a wild imagination is 
evident from experience. Young men, 
whose passions were mad as Charybdis, 
whose fancy never dismounted Pegasus, 
and never let the winged charger relax 
from a breakneck gallop, have gradually 
become tamed under the influence of 



22 INTRODUCTION. 

philosophy. The boiling of the Charyb- 

difl of the classics has ended in a quiet 
simmer ; and the furious Pegasus has 
taken to a quiet and steady walk. We 
have seen it, and others more competent 
to judge bear testimony to this good re- 
sult obtained from the study of intellect- 
ual philosophy. It is so useful, too, at 
a time when young men are going to de- 
cide the all-important question of voca- 
tion, to have their minds rendered capable 
of serious rejection, that the choice may 
be made with prudence and calmness. In 
fact, philosophy is useful to the statesman ; 
for how can he decide on questions of 
civil policy without knowing the princi- 
\ of the natural law and law of na- 
tions I It is useful to the lawyer for the 
same reasons, but it has a special useful- 
r him besides. He is a pleader; 
he must know how t<> refute his a<b 
sary 3 unents, as well as to prove his 

own case; lie needs To be able 

to form a judgment on the character of 



INTRODUCTION. 23 

the witnesses, lie must liave studied tlie 
workings of the minds of men. Even if 
'he be a physician, the knowledge of the 
connection between the body and soul 
will help him immensely in the cur- 
ing of sick imaginations as well as cor- 
poral infirmities. But if he be a Christ- 
ian minister, the utility of this science is 
incontestably suitable to his character and 
to the nature of the sciences to which he 
must apply his mind in the holy ministry. 
This, however, brings us to the third 
great utility of intellectual philosophy as 
it appears from its connection with the 
supernatural order of things. 

Sec. 3. The utility of the study of In- 
tellectual Philosophy as the handmaid of 
Heligion. 

There is a philosophy of religion as 
well as of history ; there is philosophy in 
every science. No science seems to be 
more closely joined to intellectual philo- 
sophy than theology. 



21 INTRODUCTION. 

Theology treats of revealed, philo- 
sophy of natural religion; but the lat- 
ter is the footstool of the former, for 
grace builds on nature. It might be said 
with truth, that theology is not specifi- 
cally distinct, but only a degree higher 
up the scale than philosophy ; it gives us 
a better knowledge of God than philoso- 
phy. In the latter science we see him 
faintly, as the sun in a cloudy sky ; in 
the former, though not visible as in noon- 
day brightness, still we behold him more 
clearly. Reason points him out in the one, 
faith in the other. In philosophy, we ar- 
gue from first principles, given by intui- 
tion or discovered by the mere workings 
of intellectual power ; in theology, we 
build our science on facts which we have 
learned by revelation, and by uniting 
these facts together w^e have the prin- 
ciples of a science. 

Theology treats of God, of the soul, 
and of creatures considered in a super- 
natural light; and as philosophy treats of 



INTRODUCTION. 2o 

tliem iii a natural point of view, it follows 
that the philosophical knowledge we ac- 
quire of them serves us greatly in rising 
to the higher sphere. There is, as it were, 
an echo of the supernatural in the natural 
order. Revelation's shadow falls into the 
natural order. In fact the two orders are 
inseparable and dovetailed into each, 
other, if we may so speak, in time as well 
as in eternity. 

It was the observation of this fact that 
made Gioberti invent the mental faculty 
which he calls sovrintelligenza, or superin- 
telligence — the natural power of appre- 
hending in the supernatural order. We 
say which made him invent the faculty, 
for its existence is problematic. It was 
this connection between theology and 
philosophy that made the scholastics 
give the latter science the name of " An- 
cilla Theologiae." In modern times this 
name has been rejected by many philo- 
sophers, who could not bear to hear their 
favorite science receive a name that would 



26 INTRODUCTION. 

imply inferiority. This feeling, however, 
is one of unreasonable pride, for there is 
no insult meant to philosophy by giving 
her her natural position. She is a hand- 
maid, and though rationalists may endea- 
vor to put reason above faith, they will 
never succeed in their undertaking, for 
things must be as God wills them. At 
the same time, therefore, that we give 
our science all the honor that is due to 
her, we must never exaggerate her worth. 
Men have done so in our days, and 
their conduct has been the cause of the 
general fear that has crept into some 
minds of philosophy and every thing that 
sounds like it. They look on a philoso- 
pher as a bugbear, a humbug, or a mad- 
man, lie is supposed to be a human 
being who deals only with ethereal ob- 
jects, and can not descend from his ele- 
vated position to the ordinary mundane 
sphere. This in fact, is one of the great 
objections against the study of philoso- 
phy; avc shall answer it, therefore, before 



INTRODUCTION. 27 

we end this chapter. Does philosophy- 
make raen unreal and exaggerated ? We 
have shown its utility from the na- 
ture of the matter of which it treats, 
as well as from its great power in cul- 
tivating the mind. We should not, there- 
fore, be induced to consider it a dan- 
gerous study on account of the abuse 
which some have made of it. There is no 
contesting the fact that all the danger- 
ous systems of modern times have had 
founders who prided themselves on be- 
ing philosophers. Communism in France, 
claims St. Simon and Pierre Le Roux 
as its authors; the Pantheists, in Ger- 
many, glory in Hegel, Fichte, and Schil- 
ling. We need not mention some of 
our own philosophical scapegoats, whose 
exaggerations are as great as any of the 
worst European speculations. The abuse 
never destroys the thing used. The Bible 
is abused, yet the Bible is the best of 
books ; and though food is abused by 
those who eat to excess, it does not there- 



28 INTRODUCTION. 

fore follow that we are to die of hunger. 
So is it with philosophy ; we do not 
praise bad philosophy, but sound philo- 
sophy. We speak of the advantages of 
sound philosophy, not of the creations of 
bewildered brains. There are objections 
against every thing that is good. It is 
not, therefore, astonishing that* there 
should be objections against philosophy, 
But, after all, those who know the sci- 
ence, feel that there is none more useful 
or more important; none more beloved 
of reason and more respected by faith. 
Let us, therefore, proceed to examine some 
of the most interesting questions which 
the science proposes to be solved by the 
human intellect. 




CHAPTER II. 

PHILOSOPHICAL TERMS. 

Section 1. — Logical Terms. 

j|N artist should know the names 
and uses of his instruments be- 
fore undertaking to use them. 
"We shall therefore explain some of the 
terms used in logic, in psychology, and in 
ontology, before examining some of the 
most interesting questions of jDhilosophy. 
The first simple act of the mind is per- 
ception or apprehension, and the object 
of this act is an idea. An idea is every 
object apprehended by the mind, or it is 
the object of thought. We call the first 
operation of the mind an act, though 
Gioberti holds the mind to be passive in 
the first gleam of thought, which he calls 



SO INTRODUCTION. 

intuition. In his system, intuition is the 
presentation of the object to the mind. 

"When the mind has apprehended an 
idea, it may compare it with another 
idea, and thus judge. Judgment is there- 
fore the second act of the mind, and con- 
sists in the affirmation or negation of an 
agreement between two ideas. The ele- 
ments of a judgment are, therefore, two 
ideas, and a copula or connecting link 
between them. The oral expression of a 
judgment is called a proposition. The 
first term of a proposition is called the 
subject, which is affirmed or denied of a 
second idea, which is called the predicate. 
The next operation of the mind consists 
in comparing different judgments with 
each other, and this is done by reasoning 
or argumentation. The simplest mode of 
argumentation, and the one to which all 
species of argument may be reduced, is 
the syllogism, A syllogism or argument 
is the act of the mind by which we re- 
duce one proposition from two others. 



INTRODUCTION. 31 

The elements of a syllogism are therefore 
three — the two extremes and the middle 
term. In every syllogism we compare 
two terms or ideas with a third, either 
pronouncing that they agree with this 
third and hence agree with each other, 
or that they disagree with the third and 
hence disagree with each other. The two 
terms compared are the two extremes; 
one of them is called the minor extreme, 
and it is the subject of the conclusion. 
The middle term— the term of compari- 
son — must never be found in the conclu- 
sion. Another term explained in logic is 
that of certitude. 

Certitude is said to exist when a judg- 
ment has an essential connection with 
truth. Certitude has three branches — 
evidence, common-sense, and authority. 
Judgments certain by evidence are those 
which are certain in the very act of 
thought. Judgments certain by common- 
sense are those which derive their cer- 
tainty from the infallible voice of nature. 



32 INTRODUCTION. 

Judgments certain by authority are those 
which are derived from the testimony of 
a rational being, which we admit as a 
rule of truth. 

Demonstration, another logical term, 
consists in showing that a given proposi- 
tion is certain by some one of these three 
kinds of certitude. 

PSYCHOLOGICAL TERMS. 

Psychology is that part of philosophy 
which treats of the soul. The soul is 
conceived by us as the subject of thought, 
or as that substance whose specific termi- 
nation is thought. We are conscious of 
thought by that internal monitor called 
conscience or internal sense, which tells 
us of our soul and its modifications. 
There are three elements in thought. The 
first is the representation of some object 
distinct from the soul and constituting 
the object of thought. This object con- 
sidered in Itself is called being. But 
considered as illuminating the mind, it 



INTRODUCTION. 33 

is called idea. The operation of the mind 
in apprehending this object is called per- 
ception. When the soul perceives it acts, 
and by this exercise of its activity, it, as 
it were, creates its own thoughts. The 
principal exercise of the activity of the 
soul is in judgment; that is to say, the 
mental affirmation by which the mind 
pronounces such or such a notion to be 
included or not included in such or such 
another notion. The various sensations, 
namely, of color, sound, etc., etc., which 
affect the mind when it perceives and 
acts, constitute the third element of 
thought. This element produces speech. 
It is the sensible element of thought. 
Speech serves as the sensible exponent 
of the mind's ideas. It is, as it were, the 
mirror in which ideas are represented. 
Hence the three elements of thought are 
perception, activity, and sensibility, if we 
look at thought from a psychological 
stand-point ; if we look at it, though, ob- 
jectively, its elements are object, copula, 



34 INTRODUCTION. 

and subject. The old division of the 
faculties was into intellect, will, and 
memory; but as we know sufficiently, 
well the meaning of those faculties, we 
will not dwell upon them, but pass im- 
mediately to some of the ontological 
terms. 

ONTOLOGICAL TERMS. 

We often see the term being employed. 
We mean by being reality ; every reality 
that is the object of thought is being. 
There are, however, different classes of 
being, and there are certain conceptions 
subordinate to the general notion of 
being, namely, essence and existence. The 
essence of a thing is that which makes a 
being what it is ; or to use a scholastic 
term, essence is the quiddity of a thing. 
The elements of an essence are several, 
which are called its modes or properties. 
Some are so peculiar to an essence that 
they distinguish it from every thing else. 
These are called specific properties, and 



INTRODUCTION. 35 

distinguish the different species of being. 
Other modes are common to several es- 
sences, and by these, species are distin- 
guished into kinds or genera. That 
kind which has none above it is called 
being in general. In speaking of any 
essence, we must distinguish the exten- 
sion from its comprehension. The com- 
prehension of an essence is given in its 
definition, in which we have an enumera- 
tion of its specific properties. The exten- 
sion is given by a division, where we have 
the enumeration either of the different 
species or of the different individuals in 
a species. From essence we pass to exist- 
ence. This term expresses the actuation 
of the essence. In the idea of essence is 
included the possibility of the creation of 
an indefinite number of individuals bear- 
ing its stamp. This is true of all essences 
except the essence of God. But in the 
idea of existence you have the notion of 
but one individual. In this individual 
you distinguish two elements, 1st. The 



36 INTRODUCTION. 

substance, which, is the fundamental sup- 
port of every thing that happens in the 
existing being, and hence it may be called 
being subsisting in itself, or better, an 
active force, as Leibnitz defines it. The 
other element is the mode, and it varies. 
Modes are the different ways in which 
different substances exist. Every essence 
is immutable and necessary ; but not so 
w^ith every existence. Some are merely 
contingent. God alone exists immutably. 
As contingent existences have not the 
principle of actuation in themselves, they 
suppose it to rest in some other being, 
which is their cause and whose effects 
they are. A cause, therefore, is whatever 
exists perfectly in itself, and gives the 
beginning of existence to another. Its 
production is called the effect 






Question Fif^st. 

WHAT IS SCIENCE? 

UDGMENTS are of two kinds- 
certain and doubtful. Judo;- 
ments are certain when there 
is an essential connection between the 
object apprehended and the subject ap- 
prehending. Judgments are only proba- 
ble when this essential connection be- 
tween the object and the subject does not 
exist. Scientific knowledge is a series of 
certain judgments, all derived from one 
common principle. The links of the se- 
ries are called common principles. There 
may be different classes of common prin- 
ciples, and different series of certain judg- 
ments, hence there may be different kinds 
of scientific knowledge. A series of cer- 



38 CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 

tain judgments, joined together by com- 
mon principles and constituting one class, 
is called a science. 

Science and art are not synonymous, 
either in sound or sense. Art is the as- 
semblage of the rules by which human 
activity is directed in the attainment of 
any end ; for instance, the rules necessary 
to the painter, in order that he may exer- 
cise his profession, constitute the art of 
painting. In a subjective sense, however, 
art is often used synonymously with skill. 
Still, mere manual skill is not art. Sci- 
ence has very little direct relation with 
manual exercise, while art is seldom or 
never without this relation. 

All philosophers agree that science 
should be divided into different branches. 
They often agree upon the names even to 
be given to those classes, but there is 
very little agreement about the reason of 
the division of science. The ancient phi- 
losophers divided science into speculative 
&n& practical, and an intermediate science, 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 39 

which they called instrumental. This 
division is commonly attributed to Aris- 
totle, though Brucker says that Plato is 
the author of it. Instrumental science is 
called logic, which teaches the rules of 
reasoning. Speculative science goes no 
farther than the knowledge of the object, 
while practical science endeavors to re- 
duce speculative knowledge to practice. 
The speculative sciences are physics, 
metaphysics, and mathematics. Physics 
treats of visible existences ; metaphysics 
of invisible and immutable things, and 
comprises general ontology and theodicy; 
while the mathematics treat of divided 
and continued quantity. The practical 
sciences are ethics, politics, and private 
economy. The philosophers of the mid- 
dle ages divided the sciences according to 
the three faculties of the universities, 
namely, theology, lata, and medicine. The 
other sciences were called arts, and were 
divided into the liberal and the mechani- 
cal. The liberal arts were seven in num.- 



40 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

ber, and subdivided into two classes : the 
first called the trivium, which included 
grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics; the 
second called the quadrivium, which com 
prised music, geometry, astronomy, and 
arithmetic. The mechanical arts were 
also seven in number, namely, agricul- 
ture, hunting, the art of war, architecture, 
navigation, painting, and surgery. In 
these categories neither logic nor ethics 
was mentioned, because up to the twelfth 
century these sciences were not taught 
under their present names. When Aris- 
totle's philosophy was in fashion, they 
were numbered among the arts. The 
faculty of arts in modern universities has 
been subdivided into two others, namely, 
that of letters and that of matliematics 
and physical sciences, so that now uni- 
versities have five faculties instead of 
three. Among the modern divisions of 
science, the first is that of Bacon. Fran- 
cis Bacon, who lived in the seventeenth 
century, and published a work entitled 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 41 

" De Augmentis Scientiarum," gives the 
following division of science. He says 
that it may be classified according to the 
three faculties of the mind — memory, im- 
agination, and understanding or reason. 
To memory belongs history, which is sub- 
divided into civil and ecclesiastical. : To 
the imagination must be referred poetry, 
which may be divided into narrative, dra- 
matic, and parabolic. Finally, to reason 
belongs science, properly so-called, which 
is divided into philosophy and theology. 
Bacon divides philosophy into divine, na- 
tural, and human, while he leaves theolo- 
gy to be subdivided by the theologians. 
The authors of the great work published 
in France, in the eighteenth century, un- 
der the name of "Encyclopaedia," give al- 
most the same division of science as that 
of Bacon. They divide it into history, 
philosophy, and poetry. They subdivide 
history into sacred, civil, and natural. 
Philosophy, according to these authors, 
comprises general metaphysics, natural 



42 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

and revealed theology, the science of good 
and bad spirits, the science of man, which 
is subdivided into pneumatology and uni- 
versal logic, and finally into moral sci- 
ence and the science of nature, which com- 
prises the metaphysics of bodies; pure 
and applied mathematics, and special 
physics. Poetry is divided into sacred 
and profane, and each of these subdivided 
into narrative, dramatic, and parabolic. 
The next division of science is that of M. 
Ampere, a French writer of the present 
century. His division is very detailed. 
According to him, there are two primary 
kingdoms of science, which are subdivid- 
ed into two more, and these two again 
into two others. The two latter are 
called two general series, and are subdi- 
vided into two sub-series, and each sub- 
series contains two sciences of the first 
order, and each science of the first order 
two sciences of the second order, and each 
of the second two of the third order. The 
sciences of the third order are one him- 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 43 

dred and twenty-eight in number. The 
two general kingdoms of science are cos- 
molooqcal and noolomcal. The cosmolo- 
gical sciences are either cosmological, pro- 
perly so called, or psychological. The cos- 
nioWical are divided into mathematical 
and physical, and the psychological into 
natural and medicinal. The noological 
sciences are either noological, properly so- 
called, or social. The noological are di- 
vided into philosophical and dialegmati- 
cal. The social are divided into ethnolo- 
gical and political. 

Of these four divisions of science, three 
follow reason ; but all the authors of 
these three divisions differ in their man- 
ner of explaining them. Plato divides 
science according to the end which it has 
in view ; Bacon, according to the faculty 
which is principally exercised in acquir- 
ing the science ; while Ampere attends 
only to the object of which science treats. 
What are we, then, to think of these re- 
spective divisions ? "We reject the first 



44: CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

one, because it does not divide the sci- 
ences so as to distinguish one part from 
another. There is no practical science 
which is not in a certain sense specula- 
tive, and there is no speculative science 
which may not be made more or less 
practical. Hence the division of Aristo- 
tle must be rejected, for it does pot dis- 
tinguish the parts from each other ; and 
this is necessary according to the rules 
of Wic. Neither can we admit the divi- 
sion of Bacon ; for although science bears 
a necessary relation to the faculties of the 
mind, nevertheless, according to the defi- 
nition of science which we have given 
above, memory and imagination can have 
no part in the division of science, since 
they can have no share in the acquisition 
of what we have termed common princi- 
ples. Reason alone holds sway over 
this department. We reject the divi- 
sion of the authors of the "Encyclo- 
pedia" for nearly the same reason, since 
the foundation of their division is sub- 



CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 45 

stantially the same as that of Bacon. 
The division of M. Ampere is faulty 
for the reason that he divides the sci- 
ences according to the different objects 
about which they treat, instead of stating 
the common principles as the basis of his 
division. The object of a science, and the 
principle on which a science rests, are two 
different things. Science, then, according 
to our definition, should be divided ac- 
cording to the different classes of common 
principles ; for if we were to divide with 
M. Ampere according to the object, then 
it would follow that two different sci- 
ences could not treat of the same object, 
(God, for instance,) which is false, since 
theology and theodicy treat of the same 
object, God, and yet they are not the 
same science. 

There are as many sciences, therefore, 
as there are distinct classes of common 
principles; but here arises the question, 
How can one series of common principles 
be distinguished from another ? The dif- 



46 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

ference of those series, we think, may be 
determined by tlie different motives of 
certitude on which they are founded. 
There are different kinds of certitude, and 
when the certitude of one series of prin- 
ciples differs from that of another series, 
the sciences will be different. Now, there 
are three sources of certitude — evidence, 
common-sense, and authority. From evi- 
dence arises the certitude of philosophy, 
properly so-called, and upon common- 
sense rests the certitude of the laws of 
bodies. Hence, the physical sciences are 
based upon common-sense. Now, the 
physical sciences treat either of the phe- 
nomena of bodies or of individual bodies, 
and hence we have the physical sciences 
proper and natural history. Authority 
may be either natural or supernatural. 
Natural authority treats of social facts; 
supernatural, of religious facts. 

Having premised so much on science 
in general, we shall now proceed to give 
a definition of the science of philosophy. 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 47 

A definition may be of two kinds; 
verbal or real. A verbal definition is a 
definition of the word. A real definition 
is a definition of the tiling. The verbal 
definition of philosophy is love of wisdom. 
Cicero, in the fifth chapter of the Tusculan 
Questions, tells us " that those who for- 
merly spent their time in the study of 
sciences were called ^o(f>oi " r wise men, 
by the Greeks. Pythagoras, however, 
thought this appellation too high-sound- 
ing, and hence, with an appearance of 
modesty, called himself simply a " lover of 
wisdom" — " QiXoooQos" Succeeding philo- 
sophers have adopted this title. As to the 
real definition of philosophy, it has varied 
with different periods. In the early ages 
philosophy meant no particular science, but 
only " the disposition of a learned mind 
well versed in the sciences, or at least, of 
one inflamed with the desire of know- 
ledge.'" Objectively considered, philoso- 
phy meant science in general ; but when, 
after the first ages of the Church, sacred 



48 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

theology began to be treated as tlie science 
distinct from mere natural sciences, the 
name Philosophy was restricted to those 
sciences which could be learned by the ex- 
ercise of natural reason, without having re- 
course to the authority of God's revelation. 
Hence, philosophy was commonly called 
in the schools, " Scientia ex ratione, vel 
cognitio ex primis principiis evidenter de- 
ducta." Philosophy, understood in this 
extended sense, included not only meta- 
physics, or the science of God, but also 
physical and mathematical sciences : even 
jurisprudence, economy, and politics, as 
we can prove by opening any of the phi- 
losophical works which have come down 
from the middle ages to our days. For 
in those works we find philosophy em- 
bracing four parts, logic, physics, which 
includes also metaphysics, mathematics, 
and ethics. The second of these, namely, 
physics, which was flini a very limited 
science, lias been so developed by mod- 
ern discoveries that it now forms a 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 49 

branch by itself. Hence, intellectual 
philosophy now comprises logic, which 
teaches the rules to be followed in the 
acquisition of truth ; metaphysics, which 
treats of being in general, as well as of 
spiritual being, and especially of the 
human soul ; and ethics, which discusses 
about the principles of morality. To 
these three parts may be added a fourth, 
called cosmology, which gives us some 
general speculations about the corporeal 
world. 

As authors differ in giving a verbal 
definition of philosophy, in circumscrib- 
ing its limits as well as in giving a 
real definition of it, we may venture to 
give one of our own. Philosophy, then, 
we identify with the first part of the de- 
finition of science already given. Hence, 
philosophy is a series of certain judg- 
ments based on evidence ; but as evident 
judgments are those which are included 
in the very act of thought, we may define 
p 1 ilosophy to be the " Science of thought." 



50 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

Let us run through the different parts of 
philosophy, in order to see how this defi- 
nition will bear upon them. In the act of 
thought there are three things to be dis- 
tinguished: the object, which is being; 
the subject, or mind which receives being ; 
and the laws which govern the mind in 
the production of thoughts. Hence, in 
philosophy there are three parts : the on- 
tological, the psychological, and the no- 
niological. The object of thought is es- 
sentially distinguished from the subject, 
and it is called idea or being. It may 
be apprehended in two ways — either ab- 
solutely as being in general, or relatively 
as limited being. Being which is abso- 
lute or unlimited must be God, wiiile 
restricted beino; must be a creature. 
Hence, ontology treats of the Creator and 
the creature. But as these two realities 
are made known to us by certain general 
abstract conceptions, we must discourse 
about those conceptions before speaking 
of their applications. Hence, in meta- 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 51 

physics, or in the ontological part of phi- 
losophy, we have three treatises, namely, 
general metaphysics and special metaphy- 
sics, which is divided into theodicy or the 
treatise on the Creator, and cosmology, 
which treats of the world or creature. 
Psychology has but one treatise on the 
subject of thought — the human soul. 
The third part of philosophy is nomolog- 
ical, which treats of the laws of the mind. 
A law is the rule which the activity of 
any being must follow in order to attain 
the end for which it was destined. By 
thought itself is meant the exercise of 
the soul's activity. This exercise, like 
every other evolution of a being, is an at- 
tempt to attain some end, and this end 
can not be attained except by following 
certain laws. Hence, the laws of thought 
are the rules which the mind must ob- 
serve in thinking in order to attain its 
end. But the operations of the mind are 
of two kinds, cognoscitive and affective, as 
they have reference either to the mind or 



52 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

to the will. The cognoscitive or judging 
operations of the mind aim at the discov- 
ery of truth, while the affective deal with 
the love of God and the hatred of vice. 
The laws of thought, therefore, may be 
divided into two classes, since they may 
either govern the cognoscitive or affective 
operations of the mind. Logic treats of 
the first class, and ethics of the second. 
There is a little treatise called a3sthetics 
— the science of the beautiful — which we 
have left out in this enumeration, but it 
may be considered as an appendix to 
theodicy. 



Question Second. 

WHAT RELATION HAS PHILOSOPHY TO OTHER 
SCIENCES ? 




HERE is a great controversy re- 
garding the order to be fol- 
lowed in studying philosophy- 
"We have seen the different parts of this 
science ; now the practical question arises, 
Which part should we treat first ? One 
school, called the school of the dialecti- 
cians, begins by logic; another, called 
the school of the psychologists, begins by 
psychology ; while another, called the 
ontologists, maintains that we should be- 
gin philosophy by the study of ontology. 
Let us wei^h the reasons of these three 
schools. Most of the scholastics were 
dialecticians, and. many moderns belong 
to the same school. The origin of this 



54 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

first system is found in tlie great dispute 
between tlie Stoics and Peripatetics as to 
the nature of logic. According to the 
Stoics logic is a science, and hence, like 
all other sciences, it aims at giving us a 
distinct speculative knowledge of some 
object. Hence, logic could have the first 
place in philosophy only inasmuch as the 
object of which it treated would be the 
first among the objects of science; but as 
the Stoics denied that the object of logic 
was the first among the objects of science, 
they denied that logic should have the 
first place in philosophy. The Peripatetics 
replied that logic was not a science, but 
a universal instrument necessary for the 
study of all sciences, and hence they gave 
the name of organon, or instrument, to 
Aristotle's works on logic. The Peripa- 
tetics, therefore, contend that no science 
can be acquired unless we know the 
foundation of human certitude, tlie laws 
of reasoning, and the method which should 
be followed in investigating and distrib- 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 55 

uting the different parts of science ; and 
as logic teaches all these things, it is not 
a science but a universal requisite for the 
study of all sciences; and hence some- 
thing which should precede the study of 
all science. Hence, we should begin the 
study of philosophy by logic. The psy- 
chological system is of Scotch origin ; its 
author being Thomas Reid, the founder 
of the Scotch school of philosophy. In 
this century there have been many disci- 
ples of this system in France, the principal 
of whom are Royer Collard, Jouffroy, and 
Damiron of the Paris University. Victor 
Cousin, also, in many points, admits this 
system. These authors almost com- 
pletely neglect the other parts of philoso- 
phy to devote themselves especially to 
the study of the thinking subject. They 
make psychology the foundation of all 
philosophy, and endeavor to refute the 
dialecticians as follows. They deny that 
logic is a necessary and universal instru- 
ment for the acquisition of science. For 



56 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

the object of logic is to give us a scientific 
knowledge of the rules which govern the 
thinking faculty, and hence logic could 
not be called the universal instrument of 
science, only inasmuch as a knowledge 
of these rules would be necessary to every 
scientific disquisition. But this know- 
ledge is not necessary. For just as we 
have naturally the faculty of knowing, so 
do we know naturally how to use it, as it 
were by instinct ; and we know how to 
distinguish between truth and error with- 
out having a scientific knowledge of the 
laws and principles of reasoning. Thus 
w r e see every day men without education 
and ignorant of the rules of logic, judging 
correctly things that fall under their ob- 
servation. Again, if logic were the uni- 
versal instrument of science, it would fol- 
low that as often as Ave exercise the think- 
ing faculty we should be conscious of the 
application of the rules of logic ; we could 
approve of no reason without having first 
analyzed it logically; but experience 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 57 

teaches us that this is false. Moreover 
if we assert that logic is the necessary in- 
strument in the acquisition of science, we 
fall into a manifest contradiction; for logic 
. is a science, no matter what may be its 
object, and this science can not be learned 
without using the faculty of thought. 
This is as true of logic as of any other . 
science. But, on the other hand, we can 
not say that the scientific knowledge of 
logic is necessary to acquire the science 
of logic. Therefore, logic is not a uni- 
versal instrument, as the dialecticians 
would have it. The psychologists, how- 
ever, do not despise logic. They ac- 
knowledge its utility in common with 
that of all sciences"; and they admit that 
it aids us in the investigation of truth. 
Truth being the object of the intellect, 
the knowledge of it is useful and neces- 
sary ; and as logic helps us in this investi- 
gation, it is a useful science, and in many 
respects superior to the other sciences ; be- 
cause to know the laws of our thought is 



58 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

one of the objects most deserving our at- 
tention. Besides, logic is extremely use- 
ful, because, say the psychologists, per- 
haps there is no science in which the 
mind's reflecting power is so well drilled ; 
and although, without the knowledge 
of logic, we may reason and investigate 
truth, still it is only the experienced lo- 
gician who can easily refute sophisms 
and defend truth. After having thus de- 
stroyed the arguments of the dialecticians, 
the psychologists proceed to show that 
the study of their science should precede 
the study of logic. The object of logic 
is to determine the laws of thought ; but 
as the laws of thought can not be appre- 
hended unless the nature of thought be 
first understood, it follows that psycholo- 
gy, which analyzes thought, and explains 
its nature, should come before logic. In- 
deed, the dialecticians must admit this in 
practice if not in theory. For there is 
hardly one of them who does not analyze 
the cognoscitive faculties of the mind, be- 



CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 59 

fore describing the laws of reason. In 
truth, • then, the dispute between the 
dialecticians and psychologists would 
seem to be merely verbal. On the same 
ground the psychologists endeavor to 
show the priority of psychology to every 
other part of intellectual philosophy. 
For, in the first place, the knowledge of 
one's self should go before all other know- 
ledge, since we should know what we 
are before knowing other objects. Again, 
our faculties are the means of acquiring 
all science; and hence, we should first 
study their nature before that of any thing 
else. Next in order comes the system of 
the ontologists. Men of marked ability 
— some of the greatest philosophers of the 
age — defend the system which holds the 
priority of the ontological order in the 
science of philosophy. These, on the one 
hand, admit the reasoning of the psy- 
chologists against the dialecticians, while 
at the same time they reject the psycho- 
logical method. They contend that on- 



60 CURIOUS QUESTION'S. 

tology should have the first place in phi- 
losophy, because this method is more in 
conformity with the order of priority 
which the objects of philosophy hold 
among themselves in the primitive act of 
thought and in reflection. For the object 
of thought is prior to the subject in the 
order of real existence. The object is 
conceived as something absolute and ne- 
cessary, while the subject is relative and 
contingent, and the absolute and neces- 
sary precede the contingent in the order 
of reality. Besides, thought is primarily 
constituted by the intuition of the object, 
and it is only by a kind of rebound from 
the object, in the act of intuition, that the 
soul becomes conscious of itself. More- 
over, the reflexive order requires also this 
ontological priority. We mean by the 
reflexive order, that which is distin- 
guished from the intuitive order. In the 
intuitive order the mind is conceived Ivy 
a logical, if not by a real instant, as pas- 
sive; but in the reflexive order, the mind 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 61 

acts, and thus evolves its activity. For, 
if we go back by the aid of memory into 
the history of our past life, we shall ob- 
serve that the first object to which the 
soul directed its attention, w r as not itself, 
or its operations, but exterior things. 
For we knew how to distinguish external 
objects from one another, nay, even to 
reason abstractly about them, before w r e 
had apprehended ourselves by a distinct 
thought. The principal objection against 
this system is one that holds equally good 
against the other two. It is said that it 
is impossible to treat the ^objective part 
of philosophy without supposing many 
things from psychology and logic. This 
difficulty is unanswerable. Hence, we 
reject the three systems, not for the pur- 
pose of making a fourth, but with the 
intention of giving what we consider to 
be the true view on the subject. 

Philosophy is the science of thought. 
Now, as every science must begin by its 
elements, the science of philosophy must 



62 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

begin by treating of the elements of 
thought. The elements of thought are 
three. The subject, the object, and the 
copula, or link between subject and ob- 
ject. Hence, we should begin philoso- 
phy by simultaneously treating the logi- 
cal, psychological, and the ontological 
parts. The error of each of these three 
systems consists in not admitting what is 
true in the systems of its adversaries. 
The student of philosophy should then 
pursue three classes at the same time. 
But, for convenience sake, it is best to 
begin by logic. 

Having thus defined the nature of the 
science of philosophy, let us now see 
what relation it bears to the other sci- 
ences. A science, we said, was a series of 
truths reduced to unity by means of com- 
mon principles. Hence, in every science, 
these three things are to be considered, 
namely, 1st. The general notions which 
constitute its subject-matter. L } d. The 
foundation on which their certitude is 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 63 

based. 3d. The relation of the particu- 
lar conclusions to the general principles. 
Now, it is very easy to show, that all 
other rational sciences are subject to phi- 
losophy in these three respects. It is 
evident, as far as the first part is con- 
cerned; for the general notions of any 
science must be apprehended by thought ; 
and as philosophy is the science of 
thought, these general notions belong 
primarily to philosophy, whose object it 
is to explain them. Again, the same 
may be said of the foundation on which 
the certitude of every science is built. 
For that foundation is either the common- 
sense of nature, or some authority either 
sacred or profane ; but we shall hereafter 
demonstrate that neither common-sense 
nor authority is the ultimate criterion of 
certitude ; but that both rest on evidence, 
which is the foundation of philosophical 
certitude. Therefore, the certitude of all 
sciences is based on philosophy. The ar- 
rangements of the judgments constituting 



64 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

any science, consist, especially, in deduc- 
ing them legitimately from eacli other. 
But one judgment is deduced from an- 
other by means of reasoning, and as it 
is the province of philosophy to deter- 
mine the laws of reasoning, it follows 
that, in this third respect also, all other 
sciences are subordinate to philosophy. 
This subordination of other sciences to 
philosophy is called the philosophy of 
science, and it consists in reducing the 
fundamental conceptions of any science 
to its first principles in assigning the last 
foundation of its certitude, and in giving 
the reason of the order of its subject-mat- 
ter. The name philosophy of science, 
however, is sometimes understood in a 
different sense ; as there are some sciences 
which have a double object, namely, to 
expose certain facts, or determine their 
laws and causes. This latter object is 
sometimes called the philosophy of science. 
From this subordination of all sciences to 
philosophy we again see its utility and 
importance. 



Question Third. 

what is the difference between men- 
TAL AND ORAL TERMS? 




HEEE are two kinds of terms — 
mental and oral; the mental 
term means the idea, and tlie 
oral term the means by which we render 
the mental term visible, or the expression 
of an idea. These terms are the founda- 
tion of human logic ; but human logic is 
but the copy of divine, sublime, or tran- 
scendental logic. The human, mental 
term, we say, is the idea, and the idea is 
God, the essence of God, the Xoyog of 
Plato, (the word of God,) the 6 Xoyog of 
St. John. The word of God is the reposi- 
tory of ideas. God sees ideas in his word, 
and his word is God, and hence God sees 



66 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

ideas in God, as the 6 Xoyog, or the word, 
not in God as the Father. Hence, the 
Xoyog is the mental term of God, and the 
Xoyog incarnate is the oral term of God ; 
the 6 Xoyog of St. John, the 6 Xoyog 

aapx eyevero of God is the incarnation of 
his mental term. So, Quantum licet parva 
componere magnis, our oral term is the 
incarnation, as it were, of our mental 
term. Therefore God's oral term and 
God's mental term are the same. Our 
mental term and God's are also the 
same. Yet, for all this, we are not God, 
for our mental term is outside of us. 
God's mental term is inside of him; but 
our oral term is more like God's oral 
term; for his oral term, or the incarna- 
tion, is outside of him just as our oral 
term is outside of us. Hence, God's logic 
and man's logic have the same object. 
God's truth or God's logic is man's truth 
or man's Logic; that is to say, it is derived 
from God himself. This is reducing hu- 
man logic to its primary principles; it is 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 67 

building logic on its real foundation — on 
God, the supreme reality. Hence, our 
logic is real logic — truth. 

There is but one truth, one species of 
truth. Logical, metaphysical, and moral 
are but one truth ; for truth is the equality 
between being and the intellect appre- 
hending beings ; but being is not truth, 
but being as apprehended by the intel- 
lect is truth. Without the intellect there 
is no truth, for truth essentially supposes 
an intellect. Without being there is no 
truth, for without being the intellect 
could apprehend nothing, and nothing 
could not be truth ; truth could not come 
from nothing. 

Truth is, then, a relation between being 
and intellect. Being is that which is ; the 
intellect is that which apprehends that 
which is; and the relation, the essential 
relation, between that w r hich is, or being, 
and the faculty which apprehends that 
which is, is truth. Now, as this relation 
between the intellect and being is never 



68 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

changed, neither is truth changed. Hence, 
the division of truth into logical, metaphy- 
sical, and moral, may imply different modes 
of truth, but not different species of it; if 
it implied different species, the division 
would have to be rejected by^ us who 
found all science on reality — on things as 
they are. 

This distinction between our mental 
and oral term gives us the real distinction 
between truth as it is in itself, and truth 
as expressed in language. Truth in itself 
is one and indivisible ; truth in speech is 
multiple. It is divided in passing through 
the mind as the colors of light are separ- 
ated by a prism. All truths are but scin- 
tillations of one truth, of the truth eter- 
nal and immutable. Our mind, being 
finite, can consider truth by reflection only 
in analysis. Truth in synthesis is intued 
by the mind ; but it can not be reflected 
in tlu> present condition of the intellect. 
without logical divisions and distinctions. 
The mind, in presence, of truth, sees it all 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 69 

in a confused state, but can not clothe it 
in a sensible shape, so that others may 
reflect upon it, unless it be robed in gar- 
ments of many colors. 




Question Fourth. 



WHAT IS THE CRITERION OF CERTITUDE? 
DEGREES OF CERTITUDE. 

Y tlie criterion of certitude we 
mean the last foundation of all 
certitude. This criterion must 
be an infallible sign of truth; for if it 
could admit the possibility of an error, 
or need the assistance of another means 
to detect error, it would not be the last 
foundation of truth. In the second place, 
the criterion of certitude must be self evi- 
dent ; for if it were not, we should have 
to go beyond it to find the last founda- 
tion of truth. The criterion must also be 
universal; that is to say, all the other 
motives of certitude must rest upon it as 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 71 

their basis. For, if all the motives of 
certainty did not rest on it, we would 
have certitude outside of its criterion, and 
consequently it could not be called the 
last foundation of truth. 

Authors do not agree on the criterion 
of certitude. We hold that it is evi- 
dence. We define evidence to be, " The 
perfect equality between receptive and ac- 
tive thought ;" between the act of the 
mind affirming its perceptions, and the 
intuitions of the mind receiving its ideas. 
All certainty, whether of common-sense 
or of authority, is based on this internal 
fact of the equality between receptive and 
active thought. 

In the first place, evidence is an infalli- 
ble sign of truth. * It is a motive of certi- 
tude, as we all know; and there is no 
other motive presupposed by it. 

Evidence is self-evident ; for it is inter- 
nal to the mind, and it is impossible by 
any straining of thought to conceive any 
thing prior to it in the mind, since it is 



72 CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 

in the very essence of every mental act. 
Receptive facts are the first element of 
thought, and evidence consists in the 
equality between them and the judgments 
which affirm them. 

Finally, evidence is the universal foun- 
dation of certainty. Besides evidence, 
there are only two other motives of certi- 
tude — common-sense and authority — and 
both these motives rest on evidence. 
Common-sense is the invincible propen- 
sity of our nature to affirm certain things 
to be true. But does not evidence tell us 
of the existence of such a propensity, and 
of the presence of such judgments in our 
mind % As for authority, it is evident 
that it presupposes evidence, since au- 
thority presupposes even common-sense. 
How can we know the existence of au- 
thority, unless we use our senses; and 
docs not the certainty of the senses pre- 
suppose the certainty of judgments, 
which is the certainty of evidence? 

This is the system of Des Cartes, avIio 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 73 

was tlie first philosopher to investigate 
the nature of the criterion of certitude. 

A very common error regarding certi- 
tude is that it admits of degrees. This 
error is founded in a misconception of the 
nature of certainty. Some authors, espe- 
cially theologians, distinguish two kinds 
of certitude : that of faith, and that of 
reason. The certitude of faith they con- 
sider greater than that of reason. Others 
distinguish in certitude two elements: 
the exclusion of fear of error, and the 
firmness of mental adhesion. Considered 
under the first aspect, they deny that 
there are degrees in certitude ; but they 
contend that the adhesion of the mind to 
truth may be greater or less, and conse- 
quently, in this respect, they admit de- 
grees in certitude, according to the greater 
or less number of motives. 

Now, certitude consists in the essential 
connection of our judgments with truth; 
but there can be no degrees in such a con- 
nection. If this connection of a judgment 



74 CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 

with trutli could admit of degrees, it 
would be either because there could be a 
greater or less doubt or fear of error, or 
because there could be a greater or less 
adhesion of the mind to truth. But 
neither of these hypotheses can be main- 
tained. 

Not the first one; for where there is 
doubt, or fear of error, there can be no 
certitude, though there may be a greater 
or less probability. Nor can the second 
be held ; for the -firmness of mental ad- 
hesion in itself adds nothing to the con- 
nection of a judgment with truth, for we 
know by experience that the mind can ad- 
here as pertinaciously to error as to truth. 

It is a great error, therefore, to say that 
we are more or less certain. Certitude is 
like a simple point, and can not have de- 
grees in it. In the last analysis all certi- 
tude is reduced to evidence, which is the 
basis of all scientific certitude. Scientific 
certitude should never be confounded 
with probability. 



Question Fifth. 

WHAT IS THE TRUE NOTION OF AN IDEA? 




HE word idea lias different mean- 
ings with different authors. It 
is sometimes used to signify an 
opinion or judgment, and again it is ap- 
plied to the elements of judgment. We 
mean by idea the object of thought. As 
we have already remarked, the analysis 
of thought gives us three elements— the 
subject, the bond; and the object. Let 
us examine the nature of ideas. We re- 
mark, before entering on this question, 
that no thought is possible without an 
idea ; for when the mind thinks it per- 
ceives, but this act supposes an object 
perceived^* and hence it supposes an idea, 
for idea and object of thought are one 



76 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

and the same thing. What, then, is an 
idea ? Is it a reality ? and if so, is it a 
possible or existing one ? and if it be an 
existing reality, what kind of existence 
has it ? 

Thomas Reid, founder of the so-called 
Scotch school of philosophy, in his work 
entitled " Essays on the Faculties of the 
Mind," denies that an idea is a reality, 
and asserts it to be a conception or image 
formed by the mind itself. Hence we 
can be certain of nothing by means of 
ideas. He denied the axiom of the schools, 
" Ideas nostras raensuram esse possibilis 
et impossibilis" which means that an idea 
always implied at least a possibility. He 
gives us examples of many things of 
which we have ideas, but which are im- 
possible and absurd, for example, a wing- 
ed horse. It is objected to this system of 
Reid that it leads to scepticism, because, 
as there is no connection between the 
ideas and the things which they repre- 
sent, we can not acquire a knowledge of 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 77 

the tilings themselves ; and that the pas- 
sage from the subject to the object is 
impossible, and hence that all certitude 
is destroyed. 

He endeavors to evade this difficulty 
in the following manner. As he abhors 
scepticism and does not wish to be classed 
among sceptics, he invents a faculty which 
he calls external perception, by means of 
which corporal realities existing outside 
ourselves are apprehended. In this fa- 
culty there are three elements, 1st. The 
conception of an object formed a priori 
by the mind. 2d. An affirmation of the 
object's real existence. 3d. An immediate 
persuasion of the truth of this affirmation. 
Whenever we know an object in this 
manner we are certain of its existence. 
This is the sum of Reid's system. The 
difficulty, however, is only evaded, not 
solved. For after all, even in the case 01 
this external perception, the idea is but a 
fetus of the mind, having in it no objec- 
tivity. But how can that which has no 



78 CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 

objectivity in it make us certain of the 
real existence of an object ? He answers 
by dividing ideas into two classes. In 
one of these classes we have the affirma- 
tion and the immediate persuasion as 
above explained ; in the other there is 
a simple representation, pure conception 
without reality. In the first case we have 
external perception, by which we appre- 
hend an object not merely possible, but 
enjoying actual existence. But still the 
difficulty is unsolved ; for every idea 
must imply a real object. Idea is the 
object of thought, and if this object be 
not a being it is nothing. " Si non est 
Ens est non Ens." But the mind can not 
think nothing, as an object for thought 
essentially implies a real object distinct 
from itself. To think nothing and not to 
think at all are one and the same thing. 
No idea, therefore, can be a mere spectre 
conjured up from the depths of the soul. 
Again, three hypotheses may be made 
with regard to the connection of ideas 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 79 

•with being. Either all ideas are, or all 
ideas are not, or some are and some are not 
realities according to certain circumstances 
given by Reid. But the two last sup- 
positions are absurd ; for if there be no 
reality in any idea, there can be no judg- 
ment either certain or doubtful ; for there 
will be nothing upon which to judge ; and 
we can not give reality to some ideas and 
deny it to others according to certain cir- 
cumstances, because circumstances do not 
change the essence of intellectual percep- 
tion. This essence consists in the intui- 
tion of an object ; but this intuition either 
implies the reality of an object, or it does 
not. If it does, then the connection must 
always exist ; if it does not, it can never 
exist. Nor will it do for the Scotch 
philosophers to assert that the presence 
of an affirmation with an immediate 
persuasion will decide the question of 
the object's reality, for as we have al- 
ready remarked, how can these circum- 
stances give reality to an idea which is 



80 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. ' 

unreal? Besides, the affirmation which 
clistinQTiishes the real ideas from the 
phantasms must be a judgment. Reid, 
therefore, makes the judgment the mea- 
sure of our ideas ; whereas, in point of 
fact, it is ideas that are the measures of 
our judgments. 

Another system on the nature of our 
ideas is that called the system of the 
intelligible species or of representative 
ideas. This system contends that an idea 
is a being, in the sense that its existence 
in the mind always proves the existence 
of some reality either existing or possible 
outside of the mind. The being of idea, 
however, is not being in itself, but the 
medium or imao;e through which being 
is made intelligible. Ideas in this system 
are the mirrors in whicli the faces of 
beings are reflected ; hence the mind does 
not immediately apprehend being, but 
only its Ullage; and thus it judges from 
tin.' image to the existence of the reality. 
All masters in this school, however, do 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 81 

not agree in explaining their system, for 
there are two hypotheses. According to 
St. Thomas and the other Christian fol- 
lowers of this system, ideas are certain 
forms or representations of things which 
God imprints on our soul, either succes- 
sively or in the first instance of its crea- 
tion. The system thus explained is 
commonly taught in the schools ; but it 
was not thus understood by its pagan 
inventors. Democritus and Epicurus 
considered ideas as the images or species 
which physical objects produced in us. 
According to those authors, bodies emit 
particles which form images of the bodies. 
The image of each body thus formed 
passes through the senses to that part of 
the brain called anciently " sensorium 
commune." This image is as yet mate- 
rial, but the acting intellect now takes it 
up, etherealizes it, and produces from it a 
spiritual image of the body from which it 
emanated. The passive intellect can now 
contemplate this chemically formed idea 



82 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

of the external object. The system thus 
explained is pure materialism. For in it 
there is no account made of the existence 
of spiritual realities, nor is there any 
means of having their ideas. 

But this school of philosophers, whether 
Pagan or Christian, does not give us the 
true explanation of the nature of ideas. 
Ideas are not images or representations of 
objects ; for in order that one thing should 
be the image of another, it is necessary 
in the first place that we should have an 
idea of the thing represented, as well as 
of its representation ; and that we should 
be able to assert a similarity between the 
image and the object. If either of these 
two conditions be wanting, there is no 
true representation. But the system of 
representative ideas fulfills neither of 
them ; for by it we have only a notion 
of the image. The object represented is 
not perceived by the mind. 

And as representative ideas have no 
being in themselves, (for if they had 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 83 

these, our mind would perceive "Being 
immediately,) there can be no means of 
deciding a similarity between the idea 
and the object. The idea in this system 
is either being or it is not. If it be being, 
then the mind immediately apprehends 
being, and there is no necessity for in- 
venting the intelligible species as the 
media between realities and the mind. If 
it be not being, it must be nothing ; it 
can represent nothing. Moreover, we 
have ideas of the infinite and the neces- 
sary being ; for we know what is meant 
when we hear this being spoken of. Now 
how could an image or intelligible species 
be the representative idea of this object ? 
since there would be no similitude between 
the object and the image, the one being 
infinite and the other finite. Yet simi- 
larity between the object and image is 
necessary to constitute true representa- 
tion. Therefore this system, besides other 
defects, has that of not being able to ex- 



84 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

plain the origin of the idea of God in our 
mind. 

The third system with regard to the 
nature of ideas teaches that they are 
being; in themselves ; hence idea and 
being mean one and the same thing ; so 
that being as well as idea may be defined 
that which terminates our mind as the 
object of thought. We must naturally 
admit this system, since we have rejected 
that of Eeid and of St. Thomas. It 
follows as a necessary consequence, from 
what has thus far been argued ; for if we 
apprehend being from ideas, as all admit, 
not even excepting the Scotch school, 
which admits the apprehension of being 
by ideas, at least in the case of external 
perception; and if, again, ideas, as mere 
images, can not be the instrument by 
which being is apprehended, it follows 
that we must apprehend being in itself. 
Ideas and being are, therefore, identified 
in signification* 




Question Sixth. 

is idea a possible being, or an existing 
one ? system of rosmini. 

[NTHONY ROSMINI SERBA- 

TI was born at Roveredo, in the 
Tyrol, on the 25th of March, 
1797, and died in the beginning of July, 
1855. He is one of the greatest of the 
Italian philosophers, and stands on an 
equal footing with Gioberti and Cardinal 
Gerdil. He founded the Society of Char- 
ity, which was sanctioned by the Pope as 
a religious congregation in 1838. His 
theological and philosophical works fill 
thirty volumes in octavo, the chief of 
which is Nuovo Saggio sulV Origine delV 
Idee, which he published in four volumes, 
and in which his philosophical system is 



86 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

contained. It may be summed up as fol- 
lows : In order to explain the phenomena 
of tlie human mind, we should admit no 
more nor no less than is sufficient. But 
this principle has not been followed out 
by the different schools of philosophy. 
The mind, in order to judge, necessarily 
requires certain general notions which are 
not the products of the mind, for the 
mind finds them as the materials with 
which it makes its judgments. 

There is in our mind, therefore, an idea, 
the basis of all other ideas, and yet not 
produced by our intellect. Whence comes 
it, then, if not from the mind ? Here, 
says Rosmini, we have different systems. 
Locke, Conclillac, and the Sensist school 
say this primary idea, these primary no- 
tions, come from sensations. Reid makes 
them come from a natural and primitive 
judgment, of • which all the elements are 
subjective. Dugald Stewart derives them 
from the common name used to designate 
a collection of similar objects, which the 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 87 

intellect does not, however, perceive as a 
collection, but individually. These sys- 
tems do not admit all that is necessary 
to explain the facts of the human mind. 
They sin by defect. The other class of 
philosophers sin by excess — at least in 
the opinion of Rosniini — for they admit 
more than is necessary to explain the 
presence of ideas in our minds. Plato, 
Leibnitz, and Kant make all ideas innate. 
But Rosmini shows that ideas engender 
each other ; that they can be derived 
from one ; and hence there is no necessity 
of having all in the mind from the be- 
ginning. It is in refuting these different 
systems, then, that Rosmini explains his 
own. He maintains that an analysis of 
our ideas will show them all to be modi- 
fications of the fundamental idea of being 
in general. From this idea we can de- 
duce all others, and without it none are 
possible. This idea is, therefore, innate. 
But this being in general is not a real, ab- 
solute, concrete, and existing being, is not 



88 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

God, as Gioberti and the Ontologists hold, 
but it is possible being in general. It is 
not a fetus of the mind, however, for it 
has an objectivity in itself. It is not God, 
nor yet a creature, but, like an intelligible 
atmosphere, it is an eternal and necessary 
light emanating from God, by means of 
which our intelligence contemplates all 
ideas. 

Rosmini then endeavors to explain the 
process by which all other ideas are de- 
rived from the idea of being in general. 
According to him, the idea of being con- 
stitutes the a priori part or form of all 
cognition. In order to determine this 
form in individual cases, the matter must 
be supplied by the senses. We give the 
translation of Kosmini's words : " If there 
be something else in our idea besides the 
conception of being, this something else 
is only a mode of being itself, so that it 
can be truly said of every idea that it is 
cither being conceived, or being more or 
less determined by its modes. The mat- 



curious Questions. 89 

ter of thought, or a posteriori cognition, 
gives each particular determination of 
the idea of being in general. When we 
wish, then, to explain the origin of ideas, 
we must explain two things : 1st. The 
manner in which we obtain the concep- 
tion of being. 2d. The manner in which 
we obtain the different determinations to 
which being is subject. But, as we have 
demonstrated that the conception of being 
is innate, there no longer remains any dif- 
ficulty, for the different determinations of 
the ideas of being are manifestly derived 
from the senses." (Essay, vol ii. sec. 5, 
cap. 1.) 

He exemplified his theory by the man- 
ner in which we apprehend a ball of 
ivory. The first idea in the mind is the 
idea of possible being. We think a being, 
and this is the intelligible element, the 
a priori part of the thought. Then, by 
means of sensation, we observe the 
weight, color, and shape of the ball, and 
this is the matter of thought. Thus, we 



90 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

have a particular determination of the 
idea of possible being. Hence, in accord 
ance with this theory, Rosmini endeav 
ors to establish a proposition entitled, 
"The double cause of acquired ideas is 
the idea of being and sensation." But, as 
the idea of being in general gives the 
form to our thought, and is the principle 
of our cognoscitive faculty, the origin of 
our ideas may be said to be, without re- 
striction, the idea of being in general. 
We must not, however, confound idea 
and judgment. There are two means by 
which we may have thought: either by 
intuition or affirmation. The first deals 
with possible beings ; the second, which 
is a judgment, in which there are an idea 
and persuasion of the existence of an ob- 
ject, treats of existence outside the mind. 
But what relation has idea with judg- 
ment, or how do we pass from one to the 
other? Rosmini continues to explain: 
In the first place, the mind has the idea 
of being ; then, by means of sensations, a 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 91 

judgment is produced, which is equiva- 
lent to tlie formula, " That wliicli I feel 
exists." This judgment has two elements : 
the idea of its object, and the persuasion 
of its real existence. 

If the mind separate the second ele- 
ment from the first by a process which 
Rosmini calls Universalizzazione, we shall 
have the simple idea. This universaliza- 
tion, however, is not the same as abstrac- 
tion ; for, although, when we universalize 
we abstract from the existence of a thing, 
nevertheless we leave it as a type or re- 
presentation what it always was ; where- 
as, when we abstract, we take away a 
part of the object or one of its proper- 
ties, and thus give rise to new ideal com- 
binations. For instance, the senses show 
me a tree. I immediately say it exists, 
and here there is a judgment as to the ex- 
istence. But I can conceive this tree ab- 
stractly, apart from its existence, as merely 
possible. Here, then, I universalize. I 
have a concrete and universal idea, whicli 



92 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

may be looked upon as a species or type 
participate by individuals ad infinitum,. 
But if I consider a tree in general, or cer- 
tain properties of it, I abstract. Hence, 
universalization gives us ideas. Abstrac- 
tion gives them different terms, and 
changes the manner of representing them. 
Three things, therefore, are to be noted 
with regard to universalization. 1st. 
There is a corporeal sensation, a phan- 
tasm, or perception by the senses. 2d. A 
wedding which takes place in the unity 
of our conscience between this sensation 
and the idea of beino; in general — this is 
intellectual perception. In the intellec- 
tual perception there are a judgment on 
the existence of an object and an idea of 
the object obtained by the process of uni- 
versalization. 3d. The separation of the 
judgment from the idea by means of ab- 
straction, BO that we may have the idea 
alone. This idea was universal from the 
very beginning, but as it was hidden in 
an individual, it needs this separation to 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 93 

be seen in its universality. Hence, as we 
have already said, all ideas are tlie idea 
of a being in general, modified by the 
senses. Hence, possible being in general 
is the form of all ideas. It is the instru- 
ment by which the mind renders an ob- 
ject intelligible. It is the necessary 
means of all knowledge, the light of the 
mind, and the form of every human intel- 
ligence. 

The great merit of Rosmini in invent- 
ing this system consists in his having 
given the death-blow to materialism or 
sensism ; for although this degrading 
school of philosophy had been supplanted 
in France by rationalistic electicism, it 
still continued to be taught in Italy by 
Romagnosi. Galuppi, it is true, attacked 
it, but he was too fond of the system of 
Locke to be able to give materialism a 
complete overthrow. Rosmini. completely 
destroyed it ; but he went so far to the 
other extreme as almost to fall into the 
contrary errors arising from the transcen- 



94 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

dental philosophy of the Germans. Hence 
he plants his system nearly on the same 
platform as that of Kant ; for after de- 
molishing the other system of philosophy, 
he writes thus of Kant : " Kant came 
after these. He gave a more accurate 
and profound analysis of our cognitions 
when he asserted that they are the result 
of two elements — one sensible and not 
innate, the other not sensible, and hence 
to be looked for in our mind. He pro- 
perly calls one of these the matter, the 
other the form of thought. Hence he 
does not make all ideas innate in them- 
selves as Plato does ; nor in their vestiges, 
as Leibnitz ; but he makes only the for- 
mal part of ideas innate, so that all ideas 
according to Kant are factitious, but not 
in every respect. This was a notable 
step in the progress of philosophical 
science. (Essay, vol. ii. sec. 5. "Theoria 
dell' origine dell' Idee") 

According to Rosmini, therefore, the 
system of the philosopher of Konigsberg 



CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 95 

is substantially good and acceptable, pro- 
vided we lop off its superfluous excres- 
cences. He partly admits Kant's system ; 
for lie says that the formal must be dis- 
tinguished from the material part in cog- 
nition, and that the formal part alone is 
innate. He endeavors to simplify Kant's 
system by reducing the seventeen mental 
forms to the idea of being in general, and 
making them objective. "The mental 
forms of Kant," he continued, " were 
seventeen, two being from the senses ex- 
ternal and internal, twelve from the in- 
tellect, called by him pure conceptions or 
categories, and three of our reason, to 
which he gave the name of ideas. This 
number of forms is too great, and the 
formal part of reason is far more simple." 
He then goes on to show that the idea of 
possible being in general is the foundation 
and formal part of all ideas. 

The great mistake of Rosmini lay in 
his imagining that a system which was 
the extreme of materialism should be 



96 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

necessarily right ; whereas, in fact, Ger- 
man transcendentalism is quite as erro- 
neous and dangerous as sensism. You 
can not build the edifice of truth on an 
erroneous foundation. Indeed, the refu- 
tation of Rosmini's system follows from 
what has been already said. Idea is 
being, not an image or subjective concep- 
tion of the mind, and hence it must have 
concrete and existing reality in itself; for 
if we suppose it to have existence in 
another being, then idea would be per- 
ceptible only in this being. Possible 
being in general is only potential in 
itself; hence it must have its existence 
in another being which is concrete and 
existing. It is, then, in fact, concrete and 
existing being which terminates our in- 
tellect, even when we have the idea of 
possible being in general ; hence the ob- 
ject of our mind must be existing and 
not possible being. Again, possible being 
in genera] has no reality in itself; for that 
which really exists is determined and 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 97 

concrete, not general and possible ; hence 
if being in general were the object of 
our intellect, our mind would not per- 
ceive reality in itself, which, is contrary 
to what Rosniini would desire. Besides, 
possible being in general merely indicates 
a power possessed by a real and existing 
being. This power, when used, causes 
possible beings to pass from the state of 
potentiality to that of act; but an idea 
must be real being, as we have shown ; 
therefore, possible being in general is not 
the fountain of our ideas. Moreover, 
Rosmini makes this possible being neither 
a creature nor yet the Creator, but a 
mysterious and (as he calls it) a terrible 
idea. 

Now, as Rosmini gives this idea of 
possible being in general to some of the 
attributes of God, we can not see how he 
can distinguish it from the Creator. This 
being in general must be nothing at all, 
or else it must be either a creature or the 
Creator ; and, as Rosmini will admit it to 



98 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

be neither of the two first, it must be re- 
duced to the last ; for a vague, indefinite, 
infinite abstraction like Hosmmi's possible 
being in general is a metaphysical ab- 
surdity. 




Question Seventh. 

what kind of existence has idea ? 
system of gioberti. 

[N order to answer this question 
correctly, namely, What kind 
of existence has idea ? we must 
distinguish three kinds of existences — 
the soul, other finite existences, and ne- 
cessary being. There are four opinions 
on this point. The first is that of Fichte, 
a German philosopher, which places all 
the objectivity of our ideas in the think- 
ing principle or in the to eyco. 

Fichte supposes the mind to have the 
power of presenting itself to itself, as the 
object of thought ; so that it is at the 
same time both subject and object. Hence 
the mind is every thing, and every thing is 



100 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

in the mind, as its different modifications. 
Hence the idea of God as well as the idea 
of creature, is nothing but the idea of the 
mind making itself the object of its own 
intellectual faculties. This system is 
fully explained by Fichte in the appendix 
to his theodicy. 

This system is refuted by what geo- 
metricians call " reductio ad absurdum ;" 
for if we suppose for an instant that the 
subject and object of thought are identi- 
fied, it w r ill follow that what is finite is at 
the same time infinite. 

Two conditions are necessary to realize 
Fichte's hypothesis. First, that the think- 
ing subject should really apprehend itself 
as the object of thought ; secondly, that 
the thinking subject thus apprehended as 
the object of thought should have all the 
characteristics of the real object of thought. 
But in the first place, the mind does not 
apprehend itself as the object of thought ; 
for if it did, we should be conscious of the 
fact ; we should feel that we were thought 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 101 

as well as that we think. Each of us 
would not only say, " I think," but " I am 
thought." Now, no matter how much 
we may reflect, we are only conscious 
that we think, not that we are thought. 
Our intellect never apprehends the ob- 
ject of thought as identified with the 
subject. Again, the thinking subject 
considered as the object of thought could 
not have all the characteristics of the 
ideal object which we apprehend; be- 
cause we intue an objective reality as 
distinct and separate from, and indepen- 
dent of us, having full being in itself. 
Besides, we have the idea of an infinite 
object, necessarily existing and possessing 
a creative power ; but it is evident that 
the thinking subject has not a single one 
of these qualities. It is not independent 
of, nor separate from, us, for it is we, our 
personality. It is not infinite, it does not 
necessarily exist, nor can it create ; but if 
it were the object of thought, it should 
have these qualities. Moreover, the mind 



102 CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 

as the object of thought can not be differ- 
ent from the mind as the subject of 
thought ; but our conscience or intimate 
sense tells us that our soul as the subject 
of thought is finite, contingent, and mut- 
able. Hence it must be finite, contingent, 
and mutable as object of thought, which 
it is not, and hence it can not be the ob- 
ject of thought. 

Fichte's system, which destroys the 
reality of God's existence and that of the 
world — or better, which identifies God 
and the world with the human soul by 
an unintelligible pantheism, is defended 
by two principal arguments. He says 
that must be the object of thought, with- 
out which it is impossible to apprehend 
any thing, and without which the passage 
from the subject to the object of thought 
is impossible. But such is the soul ; for 
unless the soul be its own object, how 
will you span \\w chasm between the 
subject and object of thought? 

The answer is easily given, We deny 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 103 

the soul to be the complete cause of our 
apprehension. We know the fact that 
the mind apprehends, but the manner in 
which it apprehends we know not. The 
mode of the intellectual act is a mystery 
which can not be solved. We know that 
there is no contradiction in asserting that 
the mind apprehends an object distinct 
from itself, though we be unable to com- 
prehend liow the intellect apprehends the 
object. Besides, it is not more easy to 
comprehend Fichte's system in this re- 
gard than that which he attacks ; for, let 
him say what he will, we must always 
suppose, if not a real at least a logical 
distinction between the subject and the 
object. The subject is not the subject in 
the same way that it is the object of 
thought, and hence there is not a complete 
identity between the subject and the ob- 
ject. Yet he says there must be this 
identity; for if they be distinct, how 
can they become united by intellec- 
tual apprehension? Either the subject 



104 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

must walk out of itself to apprehend 
the object, or the object must jump out 
of itself to be received by the subject. 
Still the difficulty remains ; for with this 
logical distinction between the subject 
and object, there is the same necessity for 
the jumping process as in the case of a 
real distinction. But, in fact, the objec- 
tion of Fichte does not hold good ; for 
the object and subject touch each other 
intellectually, and thus the subject appre- 
hends the object without either of these 
being obliged to go out of itself. More- 
over, every philosopher knows that the 
mode or the how of intellectual apprehen- 
sion is one of those natural mysteries so 
frequent in philosophy, inexplicable but 
not absurd. Hence Fichte's system is 
to be rejected. 

The second opinion with regard to the 
kind of existence which idea possesses, is 
that of Reid, which we have already par- 
tially explained ; and the third is that of 
St. Thomas, which has also been given. 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 105 

St. Thomas makes tlie object of thought 
distinct from the subject. This object 
is identified with contingent beings, and 
God is not immediately intued by the 
mind. The idea of God is derived from 
the idea of created existences. Now, al- 
though we may not say that created ex- 
istences may not be the object of intellec- 
tual vision, still, we deny that they make 
up the sufficient object; for in order 
that the objectivity of our ideas should 
exist wholly in contingent facts, one con- 
dition is necessary. The contingent must 
include in itself whatever is the object of 
our thought. But it does not; for be- 
sides contingent we perceive necessary 
being, and besides the finite we have an 
idea of the infinite, and conscience bears 
testimony to the fact. But contingent 
facts can not include the idea of the neces- 
sary and infinite. The infinite idea must 
be in an infinite object. Finite and con- 
tingent are ideas that come after the idea 
of the infinite and necessary. Hence, the 



106 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

system of St. Thomas, gives us only one 
series of objects, namely, objects that are 
finite. Nor does it explain even the 
manner in which we apprehend these. 
For we have already refuted his system 
of image ideas, or intelligible species. 

Let us now examine the system of Gio- 
berti. This great philosopher was born 
in Piedmont, in the beginning of the pre- 
sent century, and died in Paris not many 
years ago. Shortly after his ordination 
he was made Chaplain of the Court, and 
Professor of Philosophy in the University 
of Turin. On account of his political 
principles he was exiled in 1833, went 
to Paris, and afterward to Brussels. He 
returned to Italy during the troubles of 
1848, and was made Prime Minister of 
Charles Albert. He wrote many works, 
most of them on philosophical subjects. 
All were put on the Index shortly before 
his death. Few of them are free from 
error, and all of them deserved to be con- 
demned "in odium auctoris," for the bit- 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 107 

ter attacks made by hini against the 
Court of Rome, and the learned and 
zealous " Society of Jesus." It is cer- 
tain that lie died excommunicated, and 
very probably a Pantheist. Yet Grioberti 
is, without doubt, the greatest philoso- 
pher of the nineteenth century. 

This age is revolutionary, but its revo- 
lutions are caused as much by principles 
and ideas, as by the force of arms. It en- 
deavors to lay aside all supernatural reli- 
gion ; but not being able to do so without 
something to put in its stead, it exalts 
and deifies every thing natural. Hence, 
we see, where revelation has been rejected, 
a longing after the mystic, the wonderful, 
the preternatural, the extraordinary, man- 
ifesting itself in politics, in religion, and 
in philosophy. Its fruits are socialism, 
spiritism, rationalism, and pantheism. It 
has produced men like St. Simon, Pierre 
Leroux, the Pere Enfantin, Hegel and 
Schelling, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and 
above them all Grioberti. 



108 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

We have to remark of Gioberti's 
character as it appears in his writings, 
that he was too violent in his denuncia- 
tions, too exaggerated in his theories, 
though we do not believe that his system 
of metaphysics as given in his " Introduc- 
tion to the Study of Philosophy" has ever 
been satisfactorily refuted. Hence, while 
we condemn him as a ruthless assailant 
of the Jesuits, in the " Gesuita Moderno," 
and in the Prologomena to the " Primato 
d'ltalia," we admire his genius and learn- 
ing. His errors have been so great and 
numerous that they cause every thing 
from him to be suspected; " Timeo Danaos 
et dona ferentes." In fact, it must be ad- 
mitted, that Gioberti has done much 
harm to religion and to society. His 
style is powerful and eloquent ; torrent- 
like, it carries away the reader's imagina- 
tion, and hence, it has a special tendency 
to exalt the minds of the young with 
vague theories and ethereal systems. 

The system of Gioberti lias been well 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 109 

translated into English in Brownson's 
Quarterly Review. Gioberti makes the 
immediate intuition of God, while Des 
Cartes makes the soul the basis of his 
system. Hence, Gioberti is a strong op- 
ponent of Des Cartes, and ridicules him 
at every step in his Introduzione. 
Among other hard things, Gioberti says 
this of the French* philosopher : " Non 
credo in tutti gli annalli del genere hu- 
mano, se posse trovare un essempio di 
temerita e di leggerezza simile a questo."* 

Gioberti' s system may be summed up 
as follows : 

The philosopher may start either from 
the subject or object. If he start from 
the subject, he may either take realities 
existing outside of our mind, or the re- 
presentations in our mind as the ful- 
crum of his system. Reason determines 
the realities, and conscience or intimate 

* " I do not believe that in all the annals of mankind, 
you can find an example of rashness and levity similar 
to those of this man, (Des Cartes.)" 



110 f CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

sense, determines the images. The ob- 
ject of reason is the intelligible. Of con- 
science the proper object is the sensible, 
contained in the internal modifications of 
the mind. The one is ontological, the 
other psychological. "Ontology," says 
Gioberti, a is as old as the world, and 
may be found in the different systems of 
philosophy, both pagan and Christian, up 
to the days of that philosophical heretic, 
Rene Des Cartes. It is the basis of Orien- 
tal philosophy, from which it passed into 
the school of the Pythagoricians, Eleatics, 
and of Plato, among the Greeks. Onto- 
logism was taught in the school of Alex- 
andria, by the early Christian Fathers, 
and by the Realists of the middle ages. 
It is true that the Nominalists and Con- 
ceptualists were somewhat opposed to it, 
but it was especially Rene Des Cartes who 
broke the golden chain of ontologistic 
tradition, by putting the internal sensible 
instead of the objective intelligible. Gio- 
berti puts the foundation of all pliiloso- 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. Ill 

phy in the immediate vision of God, 
which lie calls the ideal vision, " Visione 
Ideale." All philosophy in this system 
must start from the idea, the province of 
philosophy being to work upon idea, and 
evolve it by reflection. But the idea is 
not a mere image or representation of the 
object ; it is the object itself, and is called 
being autonomastically. Creatures in the 
system of Groberti are called existences. 
Being is, therefore, the "primum pliiloso- 
pliicum? the principle and cause of all 
things,* and hence the u primum psyclio- 
logicum " and the " primum ontologicum " 
are its effects, have their last reason in it. 
Now, the intuition or vision of being 
imparts an apodictic 'judgment in which 
all evidence and certainty are based. 
Gioberti explains this as follows : " The 

* By the "primum psychologicum " is meant the first 
idea, and by "primum ontologicum " the first thing. 
But as the first idea and the first thing are the same in 
the system of Gioberti, hence, being is the "primum 
philosophicum," the basis of all reality, and of all the 
hwicolle. 



112 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

idea of being contains this judgment — 
being is necessarily. In pronouncing 
this, the mind is not a judge, but merely 
a witness or hearer of a judgment which 
does not go out of the mind itself. Being 
proposes itself to the mind's eye, and 
says, 'I am necessarily.' In this objective 
affirmation we have the foundation of all 
evidence and certitude." (Introduzione, 
vol. ii. chap. 1.) 

The first step that philosophy makes, 
is to repeat this judgment by reflection. 
Gioberti sayS, " The repetition of the ob- 
jective and divine judgment, made by 
means of reflection, is the first link in the 
chain of philosophy." But in order to 
make this repetition, we need speech or 
language, which is the bridge or passage 
in our mind from the direct to the reflex 
state.* 

We quote from Gioberti: "Between 
the primitive divine judgment and the 

* The nature of the direct and reflex state will be ex- 
plained hereafter. 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 113 

secondary human judgment, that is to 
say, between intuition and reflection, 
speech acts as the medium. It is by 
means of language that intuitive truth 
becomes accessible to reflection. " The 
necessity of speech arises from the neces- 
sity of circumscribing the idea of being, 
and of concentrating the mind to contem- 
plate it in a limited form. In short, a 
word is like a niche in which idea puts 
itself to be apprehended by the mind. 
The sum of all this is, that the mind 
intues God as being, and all things in 
Him. Hence, being is the foundation of 
reflection, and consequently of all philo- 
sophy. Gioberti speaks: "L'ente e in 
effetto' il supremo criterio, e giudicatorio 
del vero, il supremo assioma di tutto lo 
scibile, perche' e V intelligibilita' e l'evi- 
denza stessa delle cose." 

The intuition of God as being, gives us 
only a knowledge of His attributes and 
existence. But besides these conceptions, 
we have others that regard creatures. 



114 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

Whence came these? Gioberti replies 
by the idea of creation, which is the 
means of passing from God to finite exist- 
ence. We intue God as real, not as 
merely possible being. But, as it is a fact 
that His being is always cause and crea- 
tor, so, in the intuition of His being, we 
also have His creating act and its effect. 
Beholding God, we see the divine crea- 
tion, and those things that receive exis- 
tence by it. Hence, the ideal formula, 
the foundation of the whole system : 
Being creates existences, " Ens creat exis- 
tentias." Gioberti thus speaks of his 
ideal formula, "La vera formula ideale 
suprema base cli tutto lo scibile, de la 
quale andavano intracia peno dunque 
essere ensciata in questi termini, Tente 
crealee estenze." (Vol. ii., cap. Intro.) In 
this formula we have the three realities, 
God, the world, and the creation. The 
last is the bond between the first and the 
second. Being is the first and centre 
with regard to all realities. All other 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 115 

ideas are, as it were, rays emanating from 
being, as from tlie centre of a circle. All 
conceptions, then, derived from this intui- 
tion are divided into two classes. Abso- 
lute, that regard only God or possible 
beings, and contingent, wliicli concern 
only finite existences. But, although 
being is only intelligible in itself as the 
object of thought, there is a part of it 
unintelligible, namely, essence ; and as 
all the properties of this being come 
from its essence, they can not be known 
by conceptions derived *froni the idea of 
being as the object of thought. Whence, 
therefore, do they come ? How have we 
these ideas ? 

They are given at the same time with 
the idea of being which precedes them 
logically, but not chronologically. Hence, 
the conceptions of eternity, immensity, 
unity, infinity, etc., make what Gioberti 
calls the synthesis of the infinite, and this 
he calls a true revelation, "vera rivela- 
zione." 



116 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

The same may be said of contingent 
and relative conceptions, which are syn- 
chronous in our mind with the idea of 
contingent existences. They can not be 
deduced from each other, since their prin- 
ciple is unapprehended by us. The root 
of all these qualities is the essence of the 
esistenza. But this essence is as unknown 
to us as the essence of the ens. These 
conceptions, then, come along with the 
idea of being into our mind by intuition. 
They, too, are revealed. Intuition is, 
therefore, a natural revelation. Hence, 
all our judgments are synthetical, a priori, 
except the first, namely, being is. This syn- 
thesis, however, is not subjective, as Kant 
maintains, but objective, coming from the 
revelation of being, whose essence is un- 
known to us in this life. To sum up, 
then, all our knowledge commences by 
contemplating truth in itself; truth, centre 
of all truths, truth, God. But, as we see 
God concrete, not abstract, we see Him 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 117 

acting by creation, and lience tliis ideal 
formula, ens creat existentias. 

Language enables us to reflect, to 
evolve tliis formula, and thus make philo- 
sophy, which is the product of reflection. 
But, as in the intuition of being, as well 
as in the intuition of existence, the es- 
sence is always invisible to intellectual 
perception, it follows that all our judg- 
ments are synthetical except this one : 
" Being is necessarily." This is the first 
in the order of judgments, and the only 
one that is analytical. 

We shall examine the arguments 
brought for and against this system. It 
is argued in favor of it, that psycholo- 
gist, its opponent, begets scepticism and 
pantheism. It is, indeed, a fact that mod- 
ern Pantheism is not the child of ontolo- 
gisin. The German pantheists derive 
their system from Kant, and Kant was a 
psychologist. Indeed, if we deny that 
the mind immediately perceives objective 
reality, how shall we bridge the chasm 



113 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

between the subjective and objective or- 
ders I How shall we avoid scepticism, 
which consists precisely in a certain inca- 
pacity of man s mind to pass from the 
subject to the object I We have hinted 
at this impossibility in our refutation of 
the system of St. Thomas and of ReicL 
Again, the logical should be the same as 
the ontological order. But in the onto- 
logical order God holds the first place, 
creation the second, and existence the 
third Hence, in the logical order, or or- 
der of thought, God must be first. Be- 
sides, unless we admit the immediate 
vision of God we never can have an idea 
of GtxL We should have to derive his 
intelligibility from that of creatures. That 
is, we should derive the infinite from the 
finite, as the psychologists absurdly do. 
There is no doubt that we apprehend 

I ideally, for we know what the w 
God m We distinguish tl a of 

infinite from i Now, 

this idea can be contained in no other, 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 119 

indeed it must precede all other ideas. 
Tlie idea of God is the idea of a being 
supreme by essence, self-existing, and ne- 
cessary ; a being in external operation 
omnipotent. Now, what idea, except God 
himself, can represent such a being to 
our mind? How could any other reality 
represent such a being ? For either the 
reality that would represent it would 
have the same properties as the object re- 
presented or it would not. If the first be 
asserted, then it would be God, for it 
would have infinite attributes ; and if the 
second be said, then we ask how could it 
represent to us qualities that it does not 
possess ? Therefore, God is apprehended 
ideally in himself, and not in any repre- 
sentative. Besides, we have shown that 
the object of thought is neither possible 
being in general, as Rosmini asserted, nor 
representative being, as the Aristotelians 
maintain ; therefore it must be being it- 
self—God. 

The adversaries of this system do not 



120 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

dispute its power to captivate the imagin- 
ation and the heart. Indeed, no one can 
deny its elevating influence on the mind, 
for there is something; ennobling in the 
thought that the human intellect appre- 
hends God, and nothing out of Him, that 
He is the centre of all truth and science, 
pervading all human knowledge. How 
far removed is this system from grovel- 
ing materialism and narrow-minded scep- 
ticism ! All, then, admit the charms of 
ontology. Indeed, these charms have at- 
tracted some of the ablest and noblest 
minds of modern times. But, while its 
adversaries admit its brilliancy, they deny 
its truth, and it is only right that we 
should now examine the arguments 
against it. 

They say, in the first place, that this 
system is refuted by the testimony of con- 
science. Conscience should bear testi- 
mony to all the phenomena of the mind, 
and hence, if the intuition of God be an 
internal fact, conscience must make us 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 121 

certain of its existence. But we may in- 
terrogate conscience forever on this point, 
yet it will be mute. It knows nothing of 
this ontolooical vision, and hence it must 
be rejected as the offspring of a fervid 
imagination/ rather than the child of a 
logical head. This difficulty, however, is 
easily solved. For we deny that the in- 
tellectual vision of God belongs to the 
domain of conscience. Conscience tells 
us of the subjective modifications of the 
mind in the reflex state. But it neither 
tells us all our ideas nor all the facts in 
the mind. Nor can it enter the sanctu- 
ary of the soul in its direct state. It can 
not, especially, inform us of the presence 
of the infinite in our souls. For if it 
could, it would be infinite itself. The 
soul would have an infinite modification. 
It is reason that instructs us in the na- 
ture of the soul's direct state, and proves 
that we intue God's existence. When 
man shall have attained his last end after 
the reflex state of the soul has been fully 



122 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

developed, and made equal to tlie direct 
state by man's becoming a participant of 
the Divine nature, then conscience will 
feel the presence of * God in the mind. 
But here below, nothing short of a mira- 
cle can make us aware of God's presence 
in us, either in the natural or supernatu- 
ral order. Nor does the fact that con- 
science tells us that the sensation of a 
creature's presence, or that an oral term, 
which is always finite, is always necessary 
to evoke the idea of the infinite, prove 
that we do not intue the infinite, or that 
the idea of the infinite is not prior to that 
of the finite in our mind. At most it 
shows the simultaneousness of the two 
ideas in our mind in the order of reflec- 
tion — a fact which we do not deny, since 
the formula ens creat existentias supposes 
the three ideas of being, creation, and ex- 
istences to be synchronologically in our 
mind. This formula gives us the ideal 
system in the direct state of the mind, as 
Well as the real order which the objects 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 123 

Lave to each other, the idea of being 
coming first. But in the order of reflection, 
since existences have two modes in which 
they may be apprehended — one as ideas 
in the creative act, and in this way they 
are perceived by God's intellect as well as 
by ours ; the other as the causes or sensa- 
tions, and in this way they are not ap- 
prehended by the intellect but felt by 
the senses — it follows that there is a great 
difference between ideal perception in the 
direct state and in the order of reflection. 
For while conscience has no part in the 
one it comes into the second. For con- 
science tells us about facts and never 
about ideas, unless in connection with 
facts. Hence, conscience plays the same 
role ^with regard to spiritual perceptions 
as the senses with regard to the apprehen- 
sion of sensations. Just as the senses seem 
to tell us that the sun turns around us 
while the earth stands still, though it is 
vice versa ; so conscience seems to assert 
that we only see creatures, while reason 



124 CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 

teaches us that we see God. As con- 
science is the peculiar faculty which deals 
with what we feel, it is finite ; for the pre- 
dominating element in the order of reflec- 
tion is the sensible, which is always finite. 
The intelligible, or God, must be inclosed, 
as it were, in a word, in order to be con- 
templated. But here there seems to be 
a contradiction. If the reflective act, be- 
cause it is finite, can not perceive the intu- 
ition of God in our souls, how is ifc that 
reason, which is also finite in the intui- 
tive act, apprehends the existence of God ? 
The cases, however, are not similar. For 
the object of conscience is especially the 
finite, the sensible, the existing; while 
the object of reason is especially the in- 
finite, the invisible, and the possible. 
How finite reason can intue an infinite 
object is a natural mystery included in 
the mystery of creation. We know it is 
a fact, without knowing its manner of ex- 
isting; and, on the other hand, we know it 
is a fact that reflection or conscience does 



CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 125 

not apprehend the infinite. And an in- 
ference drawn from the first case to the 
second would not be allowable. Yet, 
even in the reflective order, conscience 
seems to have some perception of the in- 
finite. It knows what that idea is; we dis- 
tinguish it from other ideas. And have 
we not often felt, when under the influ- 
ence of some great passion, when behold- 
ing some vast prospect or moved by some 
great idea, as if the infinite touched our 
minds and warmed our hearts ? Just as 
saints have often felt the movements of 
grace or inspiration in the supernatural 
order. Have we not something in our con- 
science which tells us of the infinite abid- 
ing in our minds in a manner somewhat 
similar to that mysterious sentiment called 
by Gioberti the " faculty of super-intelli- 
gence," which in every natural man seems 
to admonish him of the existence of the 
supernatural % It is hardly correct, then, 
to say that conscience is entirely mute 
with regard to our ideal perceptions of 
the infinite. 



126 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

But it will be objected against this sys- 
tem, that in the order of reflection it de- 
stroys the idea of tlie infinite. For how 
can we have this idea except by means of 
language ? But this infinite wrapped up 
in a word is not the infinite; for it is 
limited and circumscribed by its " in- 
volucrum," and hence, in the order of re- 
flection, we can not have an idea of the 
infinite. Hence the ontologists are in 
the same condition as the partisans of the 
other systems which we have been re- 
futing. 

% But we answer, that, in the order of 
reflection, we have not the idea of the in- 
finite in its perfection or in its integrity. 
We see it obscurely, as the eye sees the 
sun partially hidden by the clouds. What 
we see in the word is but a ray emanat- 
ing from it. Conscience becomes aware 
of its presence in the mind by the sensi- 
ble form or sign, while the intellect is en- 
lightened by this ray of light from God, 
and mounts by its aid right to the centre 
from which it has gone forth. We proved 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 127 

by reason that in the direct state of our 
soul there must be the idea of the infinite 
in its integrity ; but in the order of reflec- 
tion our intellect can not grasp the whole 
of this idea at the same time. Every 
man's intellect is illuminated by the in- 
finite. But no human intellect in this 
life is able to bear the full blaze of infi- 
nite majesty. As the rays of the sun 
coming into a darkened chamber give 
light to the objects in it, and are connect- 
ed with the sun itself and emanate direct- 
ly from it, so that we may say it is the 
sun that dispels the darkness; so it is 
with God's intellectual light beaming on 
the human intellect and enlightening 
every man that comes into the world. 

Another great objection against this 
system is, that it tends to pantheism. In 
this regard the example of Gioberti is 
cited, who, toward the end of his career, 
is said, to have become a pantheist, and 
to have written a letter to Young Italy, 
in which the following expression occurs : 



128 ' CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

" I hold that pantheism is the only true 
and solid philosophy." The authenticity 
of this letter, however, has never been 
sufficiently proved. It is probably a for- 
gery of the Mazzinian faction. But as a 
special dissertation will be given by us 
on pantheism in another part of the trea- 
tise, and as we shall then see that onto- 
logism alone satisfactorily refutes that 
error in its various forms, we need now 
say no more of this difficulty. 

It is also objected against Gioberti's 
system, that it is not necessary that there 
should be an identity of relation between 
the logical and ontolomcal order. Let 
us, then, show the truth of this assertion. 
The ontological order is the order of 
things as they are ; the logical order is the 
order of things as they are apprehended 
by the mind. Now, in the first place, 
there is no reason why the mind should 
not apprehend tilings as they are, and 
hence there is no reason why the logical 
and ontological order should not be the 



CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 129 

same. In the second place, there is a rea- 
son why they should be the same. For 
if the logical order be not the same as the 
ontological, the mind will not apprehend 
things as they are ; and if it does not ap- 
prehend them as they are, it will not ap- 
prehend them truly, and it will not ap- 
prehend truths which would be contrary 
to the nature of the mind. There is truth 
in our mind subjectively considered be- 
cause there is conformity with the object ; 
and where this conformity does not exist, 
there is error. Now, in the ontological 
order, God is first and creatures second. 
Hence, in the logical order, the mind must 
apprehend God first and creatures second.* 
For if it apprehended creature first and 
God second, it would not apprehend 
things as they are, it would not apprehend 
truth. Hence, however much we may 
condemn Gioberti personally, we can not 
help admitting his philosophical system. 




Question Eighth. 

DOES THE INTELLECT APPREHEND CONTIN- 
GENT FACTS? 

j]E have tlius far seen that the 
idea of God is intelligible in 
itself. Let us see if creatures 
be intelligible in themselves. In other 
words, does the mind apprehend the indi- 
vidual in itself? To this St. Thomas an- 
swers, " IToP For he denies that mate- 
rial individuals are intelligible in them- 
selves. We are glad, then, to be able to 
join hands with the disciples of the An- 
gelic Doctor in establishing the opinion, 
that finite or contingent facts are not the 
object of thought. Those who defend 
the intelligibility of finite or contingent 
facts might do so either by maintaining 
that nothing but the contingent or finite 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 131 

facts are apprehended by the mind, or 
that they are perceived together with the 
infinite and their types or possibilities. 
But neither of these hypotheses can be 
maintained. In order that the object of 
thought should be wholly in the contin- 
gent, two conditions must be fulfilled. 
Firstly, that the contingent should be 
capable of immediately terminating our 
thoughts. Secondly, it should include in 
itself whatever we apprehend by thought. 
But the contingent fulfills neither of these 
two conditions. It does not terminate 
the mind by itself, because it is con- 
tingent, and being contingent, it must 
have a cause prior to itself, and therefore 
the idea of cause goes before it, and is 
the condition sine qua non of its appre- 
hension. 

Nor do contingent facts include in 
themselves every thing we apprehend by 
thought. For beside the contingent, we 
have an idea of the necessary, and beside 
the finite we have an idea of the infinite. 



132 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

Now, neither the infinite nor the necessa- 
ry can "be contained in the finite and con- 
tingent. Hence the finite and contingent 
can not be said to be the only object ap- 
prehended by the mind. 

The hypothesis that the objectivity of 
ideas is partially made up of contingent 
facts is equally absurd. For that can be 
in no sense the object of thought which 
can not at all terminate our intellect. 
But such are contingent beings, whose 
existence, indeed, we can feel by means 
of sensations, but never apprehend as 
ideas. For they have no essential con- 
nection with our perceptions. The ob- 
ject of thought is essential to every per- 
ception, and if there be any object which 
we can perceive as unnecessary to intel- 
lectual perception, it is no longer the ob- 
ject of thought. But every finite exist- 
ence may be conceived as not existing, 
and we can conceive God as producing 
all the impressions made on our minds 
by physical existences, even though they 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 133 

did not exist ; hence tlieir existence lias no 
essential connection with onr perception. 
In fact, if tliis connection between the 
finite object of our perception existed, it 
would either exist always, so that we 
could think of no creature which would 
not be at the same time existing; or 
this connection would only exist in 
certain circumstances — that is to say, in 
what we call external perceptions. But 
this connection between our perception 
and the finite object exists in neither of 
these two cases. To show the first, we 
have only to cite the case of a dreamer or 
madman, who may have many finite ideas, 
or rather sensations of the finite, without 
their having any connection with existing 
finite realities ; and to show the second, 
we have only to say that circumstances 
can not change the essence of any thing, 
and hence if the connection between the 
perception and finite existence be some- 
times wanting, the finite can not be intel- 
ligible in itself, nor in any sense be the 



134 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

object of thought. Hence, finite or con- 
tingent facts are not intelligible in them- 
selves or as individuals, but only in their 
types or species, which are in God. In 
themselves, however, they are felt ; we 
become certain of their existence by means 
of sensations. All ideas are therefore dif- 
ferent aspects of the divinity viewed by 
the intellect, and hence they constitute 
the intelligible part of thought, the ob- 
ject of our intellectual perceptions. But 
ideas, perceptions, sensations, and facts 
have a real relation to each other; for 
every idea implies a possible fact, and 
every fact implies a real idea, for facts 
are but the individualization or actuation 
of ideas. And all sensations are the sub- 
jective modifications of the mind produced 
by facts, and they give us the sensible 
elements of thought. By ideas we arrive 
at the knowledge of the existence of God 
and of the possibility of creation, and by 
sensations we are made certain of the fact 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 135 

of our own existence and of the existence 
of other created things. 

But it may be asked, if contingent facte 
are not apprehended by the intellect as 
ideas, how can it be certain of their exist- 
ence ? Since the intellect is the seat of 
certitude, every thing that is certain must 
have a relation to it. To this question 
we answer, that contingent facts have a 
relation to the intellect, though they be 
not apprehended by it in themselves. 
All the faculties of the mind are connect- 
ed; for the mind is a simple substance, 
and hence nothing can affect one of these 
faculties without affecting at the same 
time all the others. Yet the modifica- 
tions and the acts of one faculty have not 
the same relations to all the other facul- 
ties, for each faculty has its peculiarities 
and its idiosyncrasies. Hence the will 
can not be separated from the intellect, 
nor the intellect from the will, etc., though 
the acts of the will are not formally the 
same as the acts of the intellect, and the 



136 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

same may be said of the acts of the im- 
agination and the memory. Hence sen- 
sations by which we become certain of 
the existence of the finite or contingent 
facts have relation with the intellect ; but 
the manner in which sense acts upon the 
reason, as well as the manner in which 
one faculty relates to another, is a psycho- 
logical mystery impervious to reason. 
Mysteries of this kind are common in 
every .order. In fact, the last reason of 
every thing is a mystery. "We know, 
with regard to finite or contingent facts, 
that our senses apprehend them, and we 
feel an invincible propensity in our na- 
ture to believe the testimony of those 
senses. This propensity is called common- 
sense, the second in the order of the 
motives of certitude, evidence being the 
first. Now, evidence is peculiarly the 
certitude of pure intellect, and hence, just 
as common-sense, the principal element of 
which is sensation or the sensible of 
thought, is based upon evidence, the 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 137 

principal element of which, is idea or the 
intelligible of thought ; so sensation de- 
pends upon idea or reason, which is pro- 
perly the mistress of the mind ? whom all 
the other faculties must obey. Hence we 
see that the intellect may be certain of 
the existence of finite or contingent facts, 
though it does not apprehend them ide- 
ally. 




Question Ninth. 

what is meant by the history and solu- 
TION OF THE CONTROVERSY CONCERNING 
THE UNIYERSALS? 

j IND, species, difference, property, 
(proprmm,) and accident, are 
called the universals. It is 
certain tliat the ideas suggested by those 
words are distinct from the idea of indi- 
vidualities. Thus, when I think of man, 
the object which I represent to myself is 
not any particular individual, as James 
or John, but something which is common 
to all of those individuals, and conse- 
quently belongs to none of them exclu- 
sively. The question for us to treat is, 
are those five universals mere names, or 
do they indicate realities ? This question 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 139 

gave rise to many quarrels in tlie middle 
ao;es, when intellectual tilts were almost 
as common and as esteemed as knightly 
tournaments. 

There were three great schools holding 
different opinions with regard to the na- 
ture of universals. These were called 
the Nominalists, the Conceptualists, and 
the Realists. Roscelin, a French canon of 
the eleventh century, denied the objec- 
tive reality of the universals. According 
to him, a universal was but a name, a 
word indicative of no reality, but used 
to designate a collection of individuals. 
Hence his system was called Nomi- 
nalism. He acknowledged no reality 
but that of individuals. 

The second system was called Concep- 
tualism, invented in the twelfth century 
by Abelard. According to him, univer- 
sal ideas are not mere names or empty 
sounds, nor yet objective realities. But 
they are intellectual conceptions — mental 
realities — which our intellect forms by 



140 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

means of abstraction — that is to say, by 
noting the difference and comparing the 
relations between individuals. But this 
system differs from Nominalism only in 
name. For when the Nominalists say 
that the universals are mere sounds, they 
do not suppose that the mind does not 
understand their sense. But as the mind 
can not understand the sense of any thing 
without having a conception of it, the 
Nominalists must admit the universals 
to be conceptions of the mind. In fact 
the difficulty between the Nominalists 
and the Realists does not lie in this 
point, but in the objectivity to be given 
to the universals, outside of the mind. 
Therefore Nominalism and Conceptualism 
agree in substance. 

Realism is directly opposed to Nomin- 
alism. It maintains that universals have 
a real objectivity u a parte reV The 
principal defenders of this system were 
St. Anselm in the eleventh century, 
William Cliainpeaux in the twelfth, and 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 141 

Scotus in tlie fourteenth. All the Real- 
ists agree in one point, namely, that the 
universals have reality, but they disagree 
in explaining its nature. Some say, with 
the Nominalists, that there is no reality 
which is not an individual. Yet they 
admit a kind of reality for the universals. 
They say that there are many respects 
in which each individual niio-ht be con- 

o 

sidered. For instance, in the essence of 
each individual we find something which 
makes it similar to others of its species, 
and something which makes it unlike all 
other individuals. The former property 
they called its species, and the latter its 
difference. The difference is indivisible, 
but the species is by nature multiple, for 
it may be found in several individuals, 
and hencS it is called a universal. To 
illustrate this, let us take a scholastic 
example: Socratitas, in Socrates, indi- 
cates the individual Socrates. But liu* 
manitas designates something which 
Socrates has in common with all men , 



142 CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 

and hence it is the universal or species, 
while the other is the individual. Other 
Realists consider universals as realities 
entirely distinct from individuals, so that, 
for instance, though no human individual 
should exist, still humanitas would have 
its reality. But these Realists disagree 
again upon the nature of this reality, as 
well as with regard to the manner in 
which individuals are distinguished from 
the species as well as from each other. 

Some make the reality of the univer- 
sal a distinct, uncreated, and independ- 
ent existence, and they interpret Plato's 
theory of ideas in this sense. Others, in 
giving them a distinct existence, say they 
were created by God ; while others again 
identify the universals with the eternal 
archetypes of things contained in the 
essence of God, which is creation's model. 
There are also several opinions as to 
what constitutes and distinguishes in- 
dividual*. According to some, individ- 
uality is but a mere accident, which, being 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 143 

added to the universal, constitutes the in- 

9 9 

dividual. 

Others, with Scotus, admit a universal 
reality found in all individuals, and called 
liwcceitas, which distinguishes one indi- 
vidual from another, as well as from the 
species. Having thus explained the dif- 
ferent systems regarding the nature of 
universals, we shall now examine doc- 
trinally the three following questions: 
Firstly : Are the universals objective 
realities, or mere conceptions of the 
mind ? Secondly : Are they distinct 
from mere individuals and independent 
of them in their being ? Thirdly : What 
is their nature ? In answer to the first 
question we assert that universals are 
objective realities. In order to prove this 
assertion, three things are necessary to be 
made evident, namely, Firstly : That we can 
have no intellectual conception which has 
not an object. Secondly: That we can 
have an intellectual conception of the 
universals. Thirdly: That this concep- 



144 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

tion lias its foundation only in objective 
reality. That there can be no thought 
in our mind which does not imply an 
object is a principle included in the 
very nature of intellectual conception, as 
we have already shown. Besides, there 
is no necessity of proving what is ad- 
mitted by our adversaries, who do not 
deny that conceptions imply an object, 
but deny that this object is a universal 
reality. 

As to the question whether we have 
a conception of the universals or not, 
Abelard himself, as well as the Nominal- 
ists, admits that w x e think of kinds and 
species, and hence we have ideas of them. 
Finally, that the reality of the universals 
is objective and self-existing can be easily 
proved ; for in this respect nothing can 
exist in itself but universals and individ- 
uals. Now if it be denied that the uni- 
versals have realities in themselves, their 
realities must be taken from individuals 
by means of mental abstraction. In fact, 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 145 

tliis is wliat tlie Nominalists and Concep- 
tualists assert. But this can not be 
said ; for then it would follow that we 
should have an idea of the individual 
before that of the species to which it 
belongs. Yet in order to conceive an 
individual as such, it is necessary that 
Ave should conceive it by that note or 
characteristic which makes it an indi- 
vidual of such a nature, rather than of 
such another ; that is to say, with the 
scholastics, the " Quidditas rei? Thus, 
before we conceive the individual Peter, 
it is first necessary that we should have 
the idea of man — the species of which he 
is a member. For if we have not the 
idea of man, we could not assert that he 
was such or such a man. But this quid- 
dity or essence is the universal or species, 
which may be participable by an in- 
definite number of individuals. There- 
fore we have the idea of the universal 
before we conceive the idea of the indi- 
vidual. But even if we admit the priority 



146 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

of the conception of the individual to that 
of the species, still the hypothesis of our 
adversaries would not hold good. For in 
order that the mind should obtain one 
idea from another by means of mental 
abstraction, it is necessary that the latter 
should have a greater extension than the 
former ; for the greater can not be con- 
tained in the less. But the universal is 
greater than the individual, and there- 
fore the universal can not be derived 
from the individual by any kind of 
abstraction. And hence the uuiversals are 
objective realities. 

Are the universals constituted in their 
realities independent of individuals ? 
We answer affirmatively. If not, we 
should have to say, with a certain class 
of Realists, that they are nothing else 
than those properties which are possessed 
in common by several individuals. But 
this assertion can by no means be main- 
tained For it makes the individual 
contain the universal. The universr.1 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 147 

would be an integral part of the indi- 
vidual, and concur in its formation. But 
as the individual can contain nothing 
which is not individual without losing 
its nature, we can not suppose it to 
contain the universal without becoming 
a -universal instead of an individual. 
Besides, when our adversaries say that 
the universal is part of the individual, 
they must mean either that the universal 
is a reality, found the same in all in- 
dividuals, or in the relation of simili- 
tude among individuals by means of dif- 
ferent aspects, which make them similar 
without beino; identical. 

But in neither sense can the nniversals 
be said to be in the individuals. For in 
the first case the universal should pertain 
no more to one individual than to an- 
other, and hence no individual could 
claim the universal, and therefore the 
universal would be independent of indi- 
viduals for its reality. For instance, let 
us suppose that humanity is identical in 



148 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

two individuals, A and B. Since the 
individuality is tliat wliicli constitutes A 
distinct from B, humanity must be dis- 
tinguished from the individuality of each. 
But in this case individuality can be con- 
ceived only as an accident which may 
affect the same essence differently ; and 
humanity, which is the universal, will be 
independent in its reality of all indi- 
viduals. Nor can it be said that uni- 
versals are contained in the individ- 
uals in the second manner; for several 
individuals can not be similar to each 
other in any respect, without being in 
that respect, individualizations of the 
same universal distinct from each of them. 
Thus, I can not say that A and B are 
similar in any respect to humanity, with- 
out conceiving a certain archetype, of 
which each of them is an exact copy, and 
yet from which eacli of them is distinct. 
And hence the universals are in no sense 
either constitutive or accidental parts of 
individuals. 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 149 

Besides, universals are absolute and 
necessary, while individuals are relative 
and contingent. But the absolute and 
necessary do not depend ui)on the con- 
tingent for their reality, since the abso- 
lute and necessary would have their 
reality although neither relative nor con- 
tingent should exist. However, though 
the universals do not depend upon indi- 
viduals for their reality, they nevertheless 
always imply at least possible individuals. 
For two things may be considered in 
them, namely, either the degree of 
being which mates them perceptible to 
the mind ; or their participability by an 
indefinite number of individuals. Only 
in this latter respect are they called uni- 
versals. Thus, the universal humanity is 
conceived as participable by an indefinite 
number of individual men ; hence the 
conception of the universal always im- 
plies the conception of the individual. 
All that we maintain is, that universals 
would be real if there never were any 



150 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

individuals; so that tlie reality of the 
universal does not depend on the indi- 
vidual ; though the universal and indi- 
vidual, being correlative terms, can never 
be conceived one without the other. 

We assert, in the third place, that uni- 
versal, considered in themselves, are 
nothing else than the archetypes of all 
things, contained from all eternity in the 
essence of God. In order to prove this, 
three facts must be established. Firstly, 
that archetypes of things must be admit- 
ted in God ; secondly, that those arche- 
types fulfill the conditions necessary to 
make them identical with the universals ; 
thirdly, that nothing else can fulfill those 
conditions. In the first place, the arche- 
types of things are in God ; for God must 
have a knowledge of possible things, and 
this knowledge must be terminated by 
reality. Moreover, as this knowledge is 
essential and necessary, the reality which 
terminates must have the same qualities, 
and must exist in God ; otherwise a 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 151 

necessary reality could exist outside of 
God, which is absurd. 

Secondly, those archetypes fulfill the 
conditions necessary to make them iden- 
tical with the universals ; for these con- 
ditions are three, namely, the archetypes 
must be something real ; must be consti- 
tuted independently of individuals ; and 
participable by an indefinite number of 
individuals. But they are real since they 
are the object of the divine knowledge, 
and the term of the divine intellect must 
be a reality. They are constituted inde- 
pendently of individuals, for the arche- 
types of things would exist even if no 
individuals were ever created. This fact 
is implied in their conception. Thirdly 
and lastly, they are conceived as partici- 
pable by an indefinite number of indi- 
viduals ; for they are the common exem- 
plars which God imitates in the produc- 
tion of individuals, and they are conceived 
as inexhaustible. 

Thirdly, nothing else but these arche- 



152 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

types can fulfill those conditions; for if 
there be given sucli reality, it must t>c 
either uncreated and necessary according 
to Plato's theory, and distinct from God ; 
or it ^should be a created reality. But 
there can be no such thing as an uncreated 
reality distinct from God ; and if we make 
this supposed reality a creature, it must 
be identified with contingent individuals ; 
which is absurd, as we have already 
shown. Hence universals are nothing; 
else but the archetypes of things in the 
essence of God. 




Question Tenth. 

what is the difference between the di- 
rect and reflex state of the soul ? 

HE soul is said to be in the re- 
flex state when it can analyze 
thoughts and distinguish ob- 
jects from each other. Our soul is now 
in that state. But we know that this is 
not its primitive state. We know that 
we have come to this state successively, 
acquiring knowledge bit by bit. The 
further we go toward our childhood, the 
less we find in it of our knowledge ; and 
we finally arrive at a period where our 
knowledge seems to begin, beyond which 
we can remember nothing. Besides, we 
know from experience that our knowledge 
has been obtained by the influence which 



154 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

external objects Lave exerted on our mind 
and by education. Hence, we conclude 
that the actual state of our mind is not 
primitive; is not that which was from 
the beginning, for we are certain that our 
mind existed before the existence of mem- 
ory. What then was the state of the 
mind before the reflex state? We call 
this primitive state of the mind the direct 
state. As to its nature philosophers dis- 
agree. Some say the mind before reflec- 
tion was a blank, something like a clean 
slab of marble without mark or letter, on 
which external objects inscribed their 
names one after the other. In short, the 
mind was a " tabula rasa." 

But we reject this materialistic opinion. 
For the mind was never a blank. It is 
essentially a thinking substance. It has 
now the power of thought, and this power 
constitutes its essence. And as the es- 
sence of beim* is un changeable, the mind 
always possessed the power of thought 
even in its primitive state. But as the 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 155 

power in this case essentially implies the 
act, the mind actually thinks, and has 
ever actually thought. Thought, there- 
fore, has ever been in the mind, and hence 
the mind has never been a blank. 

Another school admits that the mind 
had thought in this primitive state, but 
denies that this thought ha$ any other 
element than a sensible one. But this 
too we must reject; for as the essence of 
thought never varies, and as this essence 
implies an intelligible as well as a sensible 
element, the hypothesis of the merely sen- 
sible thought must be rejected. 

In wha,t way then was thought in the 
mind in the direct state? We answer 
it was there in synthesis. Experience 
teaches us that we arrive at distinct no- 
tions by analyzing the elements of some 
object which at first presented itself to us 
synthetically, and yet by this analysis we 
do not acquire new but distinct know- 
ledge. Thus, a man looking at a vast 
landscape apprehends the whole view at 



156 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

once. He seizes it, as it were, in syn- 
thesis. But it is only by analyzing it 
that lie acquires a distinct perception of 
its natural phenomena. Yet he acquires 
no really new knowledge by this analysis. 
Again, when a professor of mathematics 
defines a circle to the tyro in geometry, 
the student^ apprehends all its properties 
in the synthesis of the definition. He 
may afterward analyze these properties 
and acquire greater distinctness of know- 
ledge. Yet he has acquired nothing pos- 
itively new, since all is contained in the 
definition. 

In this primitive state, therefore, the 
ideal formula, u Ens creat existentias," is 
in the mind synthetically, and, as Ave ad- 
vance in years, by analyzing this syn- 
thesis we obtain reflex knowledge. In 
tliis first state the intellect has the simple 
intuition of God. The will was a pure ad- 
hesion to good. The mind in this period 
of its existence is in a state of involution; 
it gradually evolves its faculties. It con- 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 157 

tinues to evolve them through, life, and 
happiness for the soul consists in the per- 
fect evolution of all its faculties. So that 
the happiness of the soul may be philo- 
sophically defined to be the complete evo- 
lution of the synthesis of the direct state. 
This hypothesis is very simple, and might 
be received. It implies no repugnances ; 
there is nothing absurd in it ; besides, it 
explains perfectly the soul's nature at the 
same time that it preserves its dignity 
better than other systems. It is, more- 
over, in accordance with analogy ; for cer- 
tainly experience teaches us that the soul 
evolves its faculties and acquires greater 
knowledge with its years; and it seems 
to be a law of nature that all created 
things should thus evolve their latent en- 
ergies. The germ contains the plant. 
The oak has its direct state in the acorn, 
and as things can not change their essence 
without losing their identity, we can not 
admit any system which would add in 
the course of time an essential attribute 



158 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

to a being which it had not from the very 
first instant of its creation. The essential 
elements of thought have therefore been 
ever in the mind ; and hence it does not 
change its nature but only its manner of 
existing when it passes from the direct 
to the reflex state. 



Question Ei 



QESTION ti/LEYENTH. 
DOES GOD EXIST? 




jHE arguments which are derived 
from the mere consideration of 
our ideas, to prove the exist- 
ence of God, are called metaphysical argu- 
ments. They are three in number : In- 
iuitive. Deductive a priori, and Deductive 
a posteriori* they are the basis of all 
other arguments which prove God's ex- 
istence ; and they are the only arguments 
that can not be disputed. We consider, 
firstly, the Intuitive. We derive this 
argument from the mere fact of our ap- 
prehension of God without ratiocination. 
From this mere fact of intuition we prove 
the existence of God. We intue God 
existing, and therefore we say He exists. 



160 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

This argument is tlie strongest on ac- 
count of its clearness. We will explain. 
In tlie first place, we liave an idea of God ; 
secondly, this idea is tlie idea of God ex- 
isting; thirdly, our idea can not give us 
God existing, if he does not exist. We 
know that we have an idea of Gocl, be- 
cause we know what is meant by the word 
God; we distinguish this from others. 
Secondly, this idea is the idea of God ex- 
isting. Existence is being in act; pos- 
sibility is nothing in itself, but is some- 
thing in the cause which brings the pos- 
sibility into the state of act. Hence our 
ideas are always realities; for, whether 
they have for their object existing reality 
or possible reality, the groundwork is 
always something real. Now, the idea of 
God is not the idea of a possibility, for 
tlie idea of God is the idea of a simple 
being, of supreme and infinite being. 
But infinite, supreme, and simple being 
exists in itself, and is not merely in the 
order of potentiality; for, granting for a 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 161 

moment that such being were possible in 
another being, so that this other being 
would be its cause, this cause would exist, 
and it would be this existing cause that 
we would see in contemplating simple, in- 
finite, and supreme being. Hence in any 
case' the idea of God would be the idea 
of an existing reality. Thirdly, our ideas 
can not give us God existing if He does 
not exist ; for perception is intuition — in- 
tuition supposes something intued. Now 
the object intued must be as it is seen to 
be. Now as our intuition in the case of 
God, gives us God existing, God must 
really exist, otherwise it would be false 
that we have an idea of him. Therefore, 
from the simple fact that we have an idea 
of God, we lawfully conclude that God 
exists. 

From this argument we may learn the 
difference between simple, infinite, and su- 
preme being, and the ideas of finite being. 
From the fact that we have the idea of 
some finite being present to the mind, it 



162 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

follows that tliis being is possible ; but not 
that it exists in itself, but that it exists in 
the infinite being which is the archetype 
of all contingent being. But simple, su- 
preme, and infinite being, or rather its 
idea, can be contained in nothing else 
than in itself; it has no archetype, and 
hence it is conceived by itself, and exists 
by the fact that it is conceived as exist- 
ing. 

SECOND ARGUMENT. 

We have what is called deduction in 
the demonstration of every judgment 
when the two terms are shown by means 
of a third to express identical or subor- 
dinate notions. This deduction takes 
place a priori, when the truth of the pre- 
mises logically precedes, or at least does 
not presuppose the truth of the con- 
clusion. Since, therefore, besides the es- 
sence of God, nothing can be conceived 
which does not presuppose the truth that 
God exists, the argument thus exposed 
by us now consists in showing, from the 



CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 163 

essence of God, that liis existence must 
be included in Ms essence. Now, whether 
we consider God's essence either as simple, 
infinite, or supreme being, we must con- 
clude that he exists. For what is exist- 
ence ? It is a mode of being. But simple 
being, that is, which is all being, being by- 
essence, and out of which there is no 
being, must have all modes of being, 
therefore, it must have the mode of exist- 
ence ; for if it had not, it would be only 
a partial being, or an u ens secundum 
quid" which implies a contradiction in 
terms. It would be saying that ens sim- 
jpliciter was at the same time only ens 
secundum quid. Secondly, we conceive 
God's essence as infinite, therefore he ex- 
ists by essence, for existence is something 
real and positive; it is a perfection; it 
means more than its opposite — possibility. 
Hence a being without existence has noth- 
ing positive in itself; but that which 
has nothing positive, is limited in its 
being, and hence is not infinite. Hence, 



164 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

though all being with existence is not in- 
finite, infinite being must liave existence. 
Thirdly, God is the supreme being. But 
the essence of the supreme being essen- 
tially implies its existence ; for supreme 
being expresses a mode of being which 
places the being that possesses it above 
all other beings, no matter what may be 
their nature; but a being not existing 
by essence is not supreme or above all 
other beings; hence supreme being must 
have existence by its very nature and 
essence. 

THIRD ARGUMENT. 

This argument proves the existence of 
God from the idea of the essence of beings 
distinct from God. The fact that God 
exists is shown from premises in which it 
is contained as the reason of their truth. 
Thus we formulate it : That being exists, 
without whose existence other beings 
would neither exist, be possible, or even 
intelligible. But such a being is God. 
To pro ve it, it is only necessary to show 



CUUIOUS QUESTIONS. 165 

tliat the hypothesis is absurd which 
would suppose beings conceived by us 
as possessing existence, possibility, and 
intelligibility, and, at the same time, not 
possessing existence, possibility, or intelli- 
gibility; such an hypothesis may be shown 
to be absurd intuitively and deductively. 
Intuitively, for by the fact that those 
beings are apprehended by us, they must 
hare some reality outside of the mind 
either in themselves or in a cause which 
has the power of creating them, which is 
their intelligible archetype, and which ren- 
ders -them apprehensible by the mind; 
deductively, for, by the fact that those 
beings are beings, they must be dis- 
tinguished from nonentity, or nothing; 
for it would imply a contradiction to say 
that a being was at the same time being 
and nonentity. But if those beings had 
no existence, possibility, or intelligibility, 
they would be nothing. Yet if God does 
not exist, the above absurd hypothesis 
would be true; for without God's exist- 



166 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

ence no other being could exist. God is 
simple, infinite, and supreme being ; other 
beings are finite, partial, and subordinate. 
But if simple, infinite, and supreme being 
do not exist, how can the others exist, for 
they are only participants of it ? They 
would not be possible ; possibility means 
existence in a cause which has the power 
of reducing beings to act; but if this 
cause do not exist, there is no producing 
cause. Hence finite, subordinate, and 
limited beings would not be possible ; 
neither would they be intelligible with- 
out the existence of God. Intelligibility 
means the capacity of a being to be ap- 
prehended by the mind, either in itself or 
in another being. Now finite, subordinate, 
and secundum quid beings are not in- 
telligible in themselves, but in their 
cause — God. Hence, as we have shown 
elsewhere, without the existence of God, 
finite, subordinate, and secundum quid 
beings would be unintelligible, impossi- 
ble, and could not exist. 



Question 



ESTION WELFTH, 




IS GOD'S EXISTENCE IDENTIFIED WITH THE 
EXISTENCE OF OTHER BEINGS? 

HE great philosophical heresy of 
the age is Pantheism. In every 
nation in which it has grown 
up in modern times it has produced the 
wildest theories regarding religion, civil 
government, and morality. Its effects are 
manifested in the literature as well as in 
the political revolutions of the age. It 
has infected not only the minds of philo- 
sophers, but even of historians, poets, legis- 
lators, statesmen, and even novelists. Its 
theories have been propagated even among 
the masses, and, actuated by its influence, 
they have risen up in rebellion against all 
law, human and divine. We assert facts 



168 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

which prove how false it is to assume that 
merely speculative or metaphysical the- 
ories exercise no influence over the minds 
of men. Most of the philosophers of 
Germany, as Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling 
— many in France, among others Victor 
Cousin, were, or are, all pantheists. The 
principal leaders of the revolution in 
1848, and the ruling spirits of the present 
movement in Italy belong to the same 
school. The fruits of pantheism have 
been socialism, Fourierism, philanthrop- 
ism, radicalism, and communism. As the 
system of philosophy which we have thus 
far been maintaining, has been charged 
with pantheistic tendencies, we shall now 
see that perhaps this modern error can be 
batter refuted from an ontologistic stand- 
point than from any other. Besides the 
nee of God there are other essences 
which exist or may exist; and the ques- 
tion to be solved between the pantheists 
and us, is, whether the existence of those 
is identified with thai of diod or 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 169 

not. The pantheists assert that God 
alone exists, and that, as he is infinite, 
nothing positive, no individual existence 
is distinguished from his. It is true we 
have the ideas of the finite multiple and 
of creation, which would imply terms dis- 
tinct from the Creator. But these are 
either illusions of the imagination, or in- 
ternal evolutions and manifestations of 
God himself, who, though always remain- 
ing the same, one, infinite, and uncreated, 
limits, multiplies, and creates himself phe- 
nomenally. This is the marrow of pan- 
theism. 

There are different schools of panthe- 
ists; different ways of explaining their 
system. The three great pantheistical 
schools are called Emanatism, Formalism, 
and Idealism. According to the first 
system God existed as a complete and in- 
dependent person when he desired to 
manifest himself in creation. But crea- 
tion is not a production of being out of 
nothing, but a communication of the Ore- 



170 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

ator's being in a finite manner. By 
means of this communication new indi- 
viduals are begotten having distinct per- 
sonal life in God. Their substance is the 
substance of God which they possess in a 
finite manner, while God has it in an in- 
finite degree. 

Hence, in the unity of the divine sub- 
stance, there are several terms each of 
which is constituted by a determinate 
particle, and the divine substance is con- 
scious of its existence in as many different 
ways as there are terms of this character. 
But this distinction of persons in God 
will cease; for creatures will return to 
their pristine unity by complete absorp- 
tion in the divine personality. Creation 
will return to its source in this way. 
Therefore creation is like a stream going 
out from the sea, but returning again to its 
source after traversing various regions. 
It is in this manner that the humanitarian 
school of pantheists explain the identifi- 
cation of the world with God 



CUKIOUS QUESTION'S. 171 

The second school of pantheists is that 
of the formalists. This school does not 
admit even a personal distinction between 
God and other beings. God is not an in- 
dividual being endowed either with the 
faculty of understanding or of loving. He 
is^ infinite, and for this reason can not be 
a distinct individuality ; for every indi- 
vidual is limited as such, and hence not 
infinite. God is therefore a force every- 
where diffused, and determined by no 
limits. This force constitutes the reality 
of all individuals conceived by us. But 
in itself considered, independently of in- 
dividuals, it is but a mere abstraction 
without reality. Hence, the various cre- 
ated beings, inasmuch as they partake of 
this force, are identical. But they are at 
the same time distinct from each other as 
ideal forms or modifications which this 
force is ever producing by an intrinsic 
necessity of its nature. There are two 
kinds of forms in which the divine being 
manifests itself — thought and extension. 



172 • CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

The first makes human minds and other 
spiritual substances. The second con- 
stitutes bodies. This is the sum of Spi- 
noza's system. 

We see that the formalists do not 
perfectly identify all things with God, 
since they admit at least a formal dis- 
tinction among beings. But the idealists, 
in order to make all things perfectly 
identical, deny this formal distinction. 
They maintain that nothing exists in 
reality either as forms or as individuals, 
but that all ideas are mere abstractions, 
or different modes in which bei'ng is suc- 
cessively apprehended by us. Nothing 
exists or can exist, though we have the idea 
of being without any distinct form, unde- 
termined, neither finite nor infinite, neith- 
er matter nor spirit, neither one nor many. 
Hence, this being is nothing in itself. 
Hence, there is no created being, but 
being is ever being created, no being is 
m facto 1 386) but all is in to fieri Hence 
all science consists in asserting that 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 173 

nothing is. This system is called Ideal- 
ism. 

We shall now begin to refute those 
systems, and we shall commence with 
idealism, for a reason that will manifest 
itself as we proceed. We must prove, 
therefore, firstly, that real ideal distinc- 
tions must be admitted in being, and, 
consequently, that the universal identity 
of idealism is false. Secondly, that these 
distinct terms are not mere forms of the 
same personality, but distinct persons or 
individuals, and hence, that formalism is 
wrong; and thirdly, that these distinct 
individuals can not exist in the same sub- 
stance, but that they imply a plurality 
of substances and the consequent rejection 
of emanatism. Thus we refute the three 
systems inversely. 

FIRST PROPOSITION. 

Ileal distinctions must be admitted in 
being objectively considered, and hence the 
system of the idealists is refuted. To 



174 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

prove tins assertion we have only to ob- 
serve that if our intellect sees real distinc- 
tions they must at least exist subjectively, 
and so must have objective distinctions 
corresponding to them. Now, it is clear 
that there are such subjective distinctions. 
The idealists themselves admit it, and be- 
sides conscience informs us of the fact. 
For there are real distinctions where there 
are several terms so. distinct from each 
other that they can not be confounded 
without contradiction. Many such terms 
are found in the subjective order. In the 
very fact of thought we have the subject 
and object distinct, which we can not 
identify without destroying the possi- 
bility of a relation between them. Again, 
the subject of thought has consciousness 
of itself as a finite being, that is to say a 
being which derives its existence from 
another. But principle or cause of exist- 
ence, and its term can not be confounded 
without contradiction. Another proof 
may be taken from the fact that the object 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 175 

of thought is varied in term in sucli a 
way that one term by its very nature 
prevents identity with, another. Thus, 
for instance, the terms finite and infinite, 
or necessary and contingent. Hence, real 
distinctions in being; must be admitted at 
least in the subjective order. We fur- 
thermore assert that these subjective dis- 
tinctions imply real objective distinctions; 
for objective being is that which termi- 
nates our intellect or wdiat our intellect 
apprehends in thinking. Hence, things 
must be objectively as we apprehend 
them subjectively; otherwise the same 
thins; would be and would not be at the 
same time. For if the real distinctions 
which we conceive subjectively had no 
corresponding objective reality, we should 
be obliged to admit one of two hypothe- 
ses — either that what we conceive has no 
reality out of our mind, and that it is con- 
sequently identified with absolute noth- 
ingness, or that it is the mere indetermi- 
nate being which the idealists make it. 



176 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

But neither of .these hypotheses can be 
maintained. The first would lead us into 
nihilism, than which nothing can be con- 
ceived more absurd or contradictory. 
And the second is equally absurd, for 
either our mind apprehends things as 
they are or it does not. If it apprehends 
things as they are, they have all the real- 
ity which we apprehend ; and if it does 
not, we can affirm nothing of them, not 
even indeterminate being, for every affirm- 
ation has its foundation in the truth of 
our mental apprehension. Besides, in- 
determinate being is a mere abstraction 
having no reality. For every thing that 
exists is determined in some way or other. 
The idealists, therefore, can not avoid 
nihilism. They can not get out of it by 
saying that there is a difference between 
absolute nothing and " JEns in fieri" for 
that which is nothing can not be possible 
or in fieri. But it may be objected that 
unless we admit the hypothesis of the 
idealists we fall into a manifest contradic- 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 177 

tion by supposing the object of the intel- 
lect to be at the same time finite and in- 
finite, contingent and necessary, material 
and spiritual, relative and absolute. For 
the object of thought presents itself to 
our mind under these different aspects. 
But we answer that those different ideas 
do not present the same being formally 
considered. The real object of thought 
is infinite being, and presents itself to 
us as possessing infinite attributes. But 
with, this idea of the infinite we perceive 
the possible existence of other beings dis- 
tinct in character and attributes from in- 
finite being, yet dependent on it as their 
cause and creator. Consequently the dif- 
ficulty does not hold, and the system of 
the idealists is refuted. 

SECOND PROPOSITION. 

The real distinctions ichich must he ad- 
mitted in objective being imply the possi- 
bility or existence of beings distinct from 
God, at least in their personal life, and 



178 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

consequently, the personal identity of all 
tilings in tlie sense (5f the formalists must 
be rejected. Here we assert two things. 
First, that God has personal life ; and 
second, that there are other beings which 
either actually or potentially do not be- 
long to this personal life. To have 
personal life three things are necessary, 
namely, First, that there be a substance 
in act. Second, that this substance be 
not subject to another as to its term of 
imputability. Third, that this same sub- 
stance be conscious of its own power and 
say "I." But God has these three quali- 
ties. For, in the first place, he exists, 
and is, consequently, a substance in act. 
He does not depend on any other sub- 
stance as the term of his imputability, 
otherwise he would not be infinite or su- 
preme being. And in the third place, lie 
has perfect consciousness of himself; for 
that which is infinite must have an intel- 
lect; must be capable of being understood 
and of b'in.;' lovied; and as in infinite 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 179 

being there is all good and all truth, 
there must be consciousness of the posses- 
sion of those perfections. Otherwise there 
would be something; wanting: in the infi- 
nite, and this we know can not be, for 
that w r hich is infinite has no defects. 
Therefore in God there is personal life. 
The second thing to prove is, that there 
are beings actually or potentially existing, 
yet not belonging to the personal life of 
God. For we apprehend, both subject- 
ively and objectively, finite beings as well 
as the infinite. We are conscious of their 
existence subjectively, for w T e are aware 
that our existence is limited; and object- 
ively, w r e conceive the possibility of limi- 
tation in being. Now, beings of this 
kind can not be in the personal life of 
God ; for if they were, their union with 
this personal life could be explained only 
in one of two ways. They would either 
be constitutive parts of his life, so that 
his life could not be conceived without 
them, or God by a free act would unite 



180 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

them to his life, and make them partici- 
pate in his nature. Now, the first mode 
of existence is impossible. For according 
to this hypothesis the idea of God would 
necessarily be connected with the idea of 
finite beings. Nor could we then con- 
ceive God as absolutely distinct from 
other beings. For a being can not be 
conceived independent of its constitutive 
parts. But God is complete in his es- 
sence without relation to finite objects, 
and his idea logically precedes the idea 
of finite beings, and consequently these 
finite beings can not be constitutive parts 
of God's personal life. Besides, the per- 
sonal life of God is infinite and can not 
be made up of finite parts ; for that which 
is made up of finite parts is limited, and 
that which is limited is not infinite. As 
to the second hypothesis, it is possible ; 
indeed, we know by faith that such a 
union actually does take place in the 
mystery of the Incarnation. But such a 
anion is a gift. It is not something that 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 181 

happens by tlie nature of things. It is 
effected by a free act of the Infinite. 

But it may be said by the formalists 
that finite beings pertain to the personal 
life of God as forms or determinations or 
mere manifestations of this life. 

This, however, is equally objectionable ; 
for, by the fact that they are conceived 
as distinct beings, they are distinct indi- 
viduals, and have distinct personal life 
of their own. Now, that which has 
personal life of its own can not be a mere 
form, determination, or manifestation of 
the personal life of another ; consequently 
the proposition as it has been enunciated 
is true in every particular. 

THIRD PROPOSITION. 

Beings distinct from God in their per- 
sonal life must he distinct from him in 
substance, and hence the substantial 
identity of the emanatists must be re- 
jected. 

The difference between substance and 



182 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

person is that the former is the support 
of the latter. Personal life is the act 
of determination of a substance conscious 
of itself, and whose acts are not impu- 
table to another. And substance is the 
very force which is put in act, or rather 
whose act is constituted by the peculiar 
determination called personal life. We 
shall, therefore, prove our assertion if we ' 
show that the same active force which 
is the subject of the infinite act, which 
constitutes God's personal life, can not 
be at the same time the subject of the 
finite acts whicli constitute the personal 
life of beings distinct from God. For 
the contrary of this assertion could only 
happen in one of two ways — either by 
the division of this infinite force, or by 
its undivided co-possession. In the first 
case, the substances of the beings dis- 
tinct from the divine act would be so 
many parts of the active force which con- 
stitutes the persona] life of God. These 
parts would be contained at first indis- 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 183 

tinctly in the infinite force, so that they 
would form only one substance ; and the 
production of finite beings would consist 
in God's taking away one or more of 
these parts, by a division of his substance, 
from his own act, and giving it a new 
determination, and, consequently, distinct 
life. Thus, as the emanatists say, crea- 
tures would come from God like the 
web from a spider, or the thread from a 
silkworm. In the other way, that is to 
say by co-possession, the divine substance 
remaining undivided, would be at the 
same time the substance of finite beings. 
In this case, to have other beings created, 
nothing is required but the production of 
new determinations in the active force 
which makes the personal life of God. 
By means of these determinations the 
substance of Gocl, at the same time that 
it retains its own act, is terminated by 
other acts, and as it were co-possessed. 
Hence in creation something would hap- 
pen similar to what takes place eternally 



184 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

in God, where the undivided substance of 
tlie deity is co-possessed by three distinct 
persons. But neither of these two modes 
of explaining the system of the einana- 
tists can stand the test of truth. For 
the first mode supposes two absurdities. 
Firstly, that the undivided divine act has 
a divisible substance under it. Secondly, 
that parts may be taken from this sub- 
stance to be the subject of new determi- 
nations. Now wherever there is divisi- 
bility there is multiplicity ; and as the 
act of God is supposed to be divisible, 
his substance must be multiple also, and 
there must be multiplicity of acts. Act 
is the determination of substance, or 
rather it is substance itself determined. 
Hence a determination is nothing real out 
of the force which underlies it. Con- 
sequently where this force is found mul- 
tiple, the determinations of it must also 
be multiple. It is, therefore, repugnant 
that one act, or determination in exist- 
ence, should be supported by many active 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 185 

forces instead of one. Consequently the 
first hypothesis falls to tlie ground. Kor 
can the second be better defended ; for if 
the divine act, or existence, could lose any 
part of its substance, it would be pos- 
sible to separate an active force from its 
actual state, or determination in exist- 
ence, and the force itself would be some- 
thing independently real and concrete. 
But this consequence is opposed to the 
true notion of substance; for just as 
there is no existing determination with- 
out a substance, so there is no substance 
without a determination. Besides, in this 
hypothesis, God could lose some of his 
being, which is contrary to the notions 
we have of his infinity and immutability. 
The other hypothesis is equally erroneous, 
namely, that the active force of Grod re- 
maining; undivided could, at the same 
time, constitute the active force of other 
beings by co-possession. For the deter- 
mination of any active force does not 
differ from its exercise ; indeed, it is this 



186 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

force* itself manifesting itself in act. Now 
if tliis be true, either the force of God 
would be completely expended in each of 
the finite beings which w r ould co-possess 
it, or it would be completely expended 
in none of them, but in their collection ; 
or finally, it would be completely expend- 
ed in one of these, and incompletely in 
others. But each of these three hypo- 
theses is absurd. In the first place, there 
is no difference between one complete 
manifestation of a force and another ; is 
it not, therefore, a contradiction of terms 
to suppose at the same time several com- 
plete manifestations of the same force in 
different beings? Besides, in the first 
hypothesis, each of these manifestations 
would be God, which is another absurd- 
ity. And if the second hypothesis be 
maintained, each of the manifestations 
would be finite ; and hence God as infinite 
being will be supposed without personal 
life, since a finite manifestation can not 
express infinite personal life 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 187 

Moreover, this hypothesis would make 
us admit multiplicity of parts in God. 
For if there be several existences or beings 
in act, different in their nature and inde- 
pendent of each other, they can not be 
manifestations of the same force, but of 
different forces. The same distinction 
that exists among; them must exist amono; 
their forces. 'Nov is the third supposi- 
tion more tenable than the other two, 
namely, that it would manifest itself com- 
pletely in one and incompletely in an- 
other. For there is a contradiction in 
supposing that the same active force may 
be and not be completely manifested in 
the same act at the same moment. And 
yet this contradiction is implied in the 
third supposition. For, according to it, 
the substance of God would be shown 
forth in several acts or existences at the 
same time, being in one of them complete 
and in the others incomplete. Hence, the 
divine substance would have a complete 
act, and yet it would not be complete. 



188 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

For it would not be complete in many- 
other acts. Therefore, we conclude that 
beings which are separated from God in 
their personal life must be also separated 
from him in their substance, and conse- 
quently emanatism is false. 

Several objections are made by pan- 
theists against us. For instance, they say 
that, according to Christian faith, there are 
three distinct persons in God in the same 
substance; and if this be not absurd, 
neither is it absurd to suppose the sub- 
stance of God co-possessed by an infinite 
number of persons. 

We answer this difficulty by denying 
the parity. For the three persons of the 
Trinity are not three acts or three inde- 
pendent determinations of the divine sub- 
stance, but only distinct terms, none of 
which is complete without the others, as 
the three are essentially necessary to the 
nature of God. But this is not the case 
with the co-possession of the emanatists. 
For the co-possessing beings would in 



CILRIOUS QUESTIONS. 189 

tlieir system be real and separate acts of 
the same substance, and this hypothesis 
Ave have refuted. 

It is objected, in the second place, that 
every being produced by another must 
be a mere mode of its producer, and hence 
the anti-pantheistic idea of creation is ab- 
surd. For if the being produced be not 
a mere mode of its cause, either the cause 
and effect have the same attributes or 
they have not. If they have the same 
attributes, they are identical ; and if they 
have not the same attributes, how can we 
suppose the cause to give its effect at- 
tributes which the cause does not possess? 
We answer, in the first place, by observ- 
ing that herein lies the mystery of crea- 
tion ; which being a fact well attested by 
reason, can not be given up because of 
obscurity met with in trying to under- 
stand it. The sun is still the sun though 
clouds may obscure its shining. Besides, 
in fact it is no more difficult for us to ex- 
plain the production of one substance by 



190 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

another than for the pantheists to explain 
the production of modes by a substance. 
And now that we have made this remark, 
we answer the difficulty directly by say- 
ing that it is neither true nor certain that 
because the producer and produced have 
the same attributes they are therefore 
identical. For to be identical they must 
have the same existence and essence. 
And as to the second hypothesis, it is 
true the cause must have the reality 
which it gives to the effect ; but the cause 
may. have this reality in a different way, 
or in a different degree from the effect. 

It is again objected that finite beings, 
from the very fact that they participate 
in the nature of infinite being, must be 
identified with it. For only that being 
is distinct and separate from infinite being 
which in no ways participates in it. 

This Ave deny. Participation is not 
identity; it is only similitude, which will 
be greater or Less according to the degree 
of participation. 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 191 

It is finally objected that unless we 
admit the theory of pantheism we must 
deny the infinity of God. For if God be 
infinite he must contain all being, and 
hence there can be no being out of him. 
In a word, let us suppose the being of 
God to be represented by the letter X, 
and the being of creatures by the letter 
Y. If we suppose Y not to be included 
in X 7 as we do ; then X y the infinite, will 
be less than X + Y In other words, X 
will be, at the same time infinite and not 
infinite. It will be infinite as it is sup- 
posed, and it will not be infinite since it 
will not contain the being Y. 

We answer this difficulty by observing 
that the expression X+ Y> Xis only true 
when Y adds something to the intrinsic 
value of X In the present case Y adds 
nothing to X intrinsically but only exten- 
sively. A man, for instance, who has 
several copies of the same book, has not 
more science, by this fact, than he who 
has only one copy. X possesses in an 



192 CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 

eminent degree all tlie perfections con- 
tained in Y j for Y is an exemplar struck 
off from its type which is in X. Of course 
there is a natural mystery in the distinc- 
tion caused by creation between ^Tand Y. 
In this answer the natural mystery is 
supposed, but in the opinion of the pan- 
theists there is an absurdity implied; 
since the being JTcan not be infinite, for 
it has finite parts, namely, Y. 




Question Thirteenth. 

WHAT IS BEAUTY IN ART ? 

|HEN we behold certain objects 
either in nature or in art, as a 
landscape, a palace, or a statue, 
we experience in the first place a sensa- 
tion accompanied with the idea of some 
excellence in the object. Secondly, we 
pronounce it to be pretty, handsome, 
beautiful, or sublime. Finally, we expe- 
rience a certain pleasure in our soul which 
incites us to love the object contemplated. 
And those three phenomena give us the 
psychological analysis of what is called 
the aesthetic taste. Let us .then endeavor 
to expose the systems of different au- 
thors regarding the nature of the beau- 
tiful; and secondly, let us give its true 



194 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

notion. Many indeed are the systems of 
different authors regarding the nature of 
the beautiful. Some identify it with 
utility y some place it in novelty or cus- 
torn; some in magnitude or exaggera- 
tion / others in imitation or illusion ; in 
proportion of parts, or in unity joined to 
variety. Let us expose, in the first place, 
the system of utility. 

A thing is said to be useful when it is 
advantageous to us, that is, when it sat- 
isfies our natural wants, or procures us 
pleasure. An object may be useful either 
in the present or in the future, as we en- 
joy it actually or only in hope. It may 
be immediately or mediately useful, ac- 
cording as it gives us immediate pleasure 
or is only the means by which we may 
procure objects capable of imparting 
pleasure. Thus the fruit which we eat 
is useful in the present ; the fruit as yet 
unplucked from the tree is an example 
of the future useful. In both cases, 
whether we eat it or only have the ex- 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 195 

pectation of consuming it or enjoying it, 
it is immediately useful, while the money 
with which we may procure it is only me- 
diately useful. 

Thus far the whole utilitarian 
school agree ; but now they begin to di- 
verge into many systems. The sensual- 
ists make beauty consist in present and 
immediate utility; thus identifying the 
beautiful with the sensible impression 
which objects incite in us. According to 
this system things are beautiful when 
they give us pleasant sensations; ugly, 
when the impressions produced are not 
pleasant. Hence beauty and deformity 
are mere sensible facts with which reason 
or idea has nothing to do. 

Hence, it is impossible to make any 
theory on the beautiful, or try to deter- 
mine, a priori, why external objects af- 
fect us pleasantly or unpleasantly. There- 
fore the two latter elements of aesthetic 
taste mentioned above are rejected; for 
the sensualists admit no judgment or ses- 



196 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

t]ietic sense as distinguished from the first 
impression of an object, in their psycho- 
logical analysis of the beautiful. 

Others of the sensualist school make 
beauty consist in the future useful, whe- 
ther mediate or immediate. They ex- 
plain their theory thus : When an object 
is presented to our regard, it impresses a 
beautiful sensation upon us, and either 
by the force of the impression itself, or 
by calling in the aid of the memory, we 
pronounce the object to be either useful 
or useless and injurious. 

If we judge it useful, we desire to en- 
joy it, and hence it is beautiful. If it be 
useless, we experience no aesthetic sense 
whatever; we are moved towards it nei- 
ther by feelings of admiration nor dis- 
like. And if we judge it to be injurious, 
Ave shrink from it, we abhor it, and call 
it ugly or deformed. Thus ripe crops in 
the fields or trees laden with fruit are 
beautiful, because (hey are useful ; whilst 
a shipwreck, or any iking else betokening 



CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 197 

destruction, is ugly because it is or may 
be injurious to us. Thus far the second 
school of utilitarians. 

In order to refute both opinions 
we establish the following proposition : 
The beautiful or the deformed in nature 
does not consist in the pleasant or un- 
pleasant impressions made on us by sen- 
sible objects. To prove this proposition, 
we* remark, in the first place, that the im- 
pressions produced on us by external ob- 
jects are entirely subjective and relative, 
depending on the peculiarity of each in- 
dividual's mind, and having no existence 
in the objects themselves. But when we 
judge a thing to be beautiful, we sup- 
pose something objective and absolute in 
beauty ; we are persuaded that beauty is 
in the object, and that it would exist 
even though the impressions should cease 
to exist. Consequently we can not iden- 
tify beauty with our sensible impressions. 
Besides, unity is one of the conditions of 
the beautiful ; thus, that a house may be 



198 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

beautiful it must constitute one whole be- 
ing, though having several distinct parts ; 
but unity is altogether an intellectual con- 
ception which no sensible impression can 
give us. For unity essentially expresses 
either a relation of parts to a whole or 
of parts to each other. Now the notion 
of such relation sensibility can not give ; 
for it is the nature of this faculty to give 
us as many impressions as there are parts 
in the external object. And again the same 
species of beauty is found in objects 
giving entirely different impressions. 
For instance, the solemn music of a 
church choir, the pomp of the ceremonies, 
and the religious architecture of the build- 
ing excite the same species of aesthetic feel- 
ings in us, and have a relation to each other ; 
while the music of the opera, the archi- 
tecture of a theatre, and the mazes of the 
ballet, though giving similar impressions, 
and though beautiful in themselves, 
would be out of place in the sanctuary, 
because the beautiful is different in both 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 199 

cases. But this difference is inexplicable 
in the system which we are refuting. 
For if beauty consists only in the sen- 
sible impression produced in us by an 
object, any two objects would be beauti- 
ful only in case the impressions produced 
were alike; but this would not hold 
good in the examples cited ; for what 
similarity is there between the sounds of 
the music and the colors of the objects 
mentioned ? This opinion may be refut- 
ed also by considering how the aesthetic 
faculty acts. For according to the sys- 
tem which we are discussing, whenever 
the impression is the same, the sesthetical 
judgment should be the same. But this 
does not happen. For in the first place, 
if we suppose two men, one a connoisseur 
and the other not, to examine a painting 
of some excellence, the sensible impres- 
sion produced will be the same in both 
cases, yet evidently the aesthetical judg- 
ment will not be identical, for that of 
the connoisseur will show a greater ap- 



200 'CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

preciation of beauty than tliat of his less 
skilled companion; therefore the sesthet- 
ical object can not be identified with the 
sensible impression. 

Secondly, the sesthetical faculty may 
be educated by the exercise of attention 
and with the aid of documents. Hence, 
the beautiful does not consist in the im- 
pression produced by the objects ; for if 
such were the case, the judgment of the 
beauty of an object could not be changed 
without changing the sensible impression ; 
but we know by experience that many an 
object which for a long time may not 
have pleased us, finally gives us sesthetical 
delight, without any change of the im- 
pression haviDg been produced. Finally, 
from the fact that men dispute daily 
about the beautiful or deformed, we may 
conclude that neither consists in the plea- 
Bant or unpleasant impressions produced 
in us by external objects. For as these 
impressions are merely subjective, it would 
be folly to dispute about the fact wheth- 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 201 

er they were pleasant or unpleasant, since 
it would depend on each individual's pri- 
vate appreciation, against which no argu- 
ments would avail. Nor can it "be ob- 
jected in favor of this opinion that the 
presence of beautiful objects affects us 
pleasantly, while the presence of deformed 
objects affects us unpleasantly, and that 
this phenomenon is therefore the effect 
of the sensible impression produced ; for 
this is confounding the cause with the 
effect. It is the idea of the beautiful that 
produces the sesthetical judgment. The 
impression is the result and not the cause 
of the beautiful. 

In the second place, we assert that the 
notion of the beautiful consists neither in 
the mediate nor the immediate future utility 
of objects. This assertion is the opposite 
of utilitarianism — a system which is par- 
tially the result of the philosophy of the 
materialists of the last century. In the 
first place, we observe that there are many 
objects useful which are not beautiful; 



202 CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 

for instance, the tools of workmen and 
artisans. Besides, if we identify the 
beautiful with the useful, it will follow 
that the more useful the object is, the 
more beautiful it will be. But experi- 
ence teaches this to be false. For instance, 
antique vases are much less useful for 
drinking purposes than modern goblets, 
yet not, on that account, less beautiful. 
And this same principle holds in archi- 
tecture, for it is not always the most com- 
modious or useful house that is the most 
beautiful. Again, a fruit-tree is more 
useful to the possessor than to the travel- 
er who contemplates it, yet it is equally 
beautiful to both. Again, it would fol- 
low from the utilitarian system that those 
would be the best connoisseurs of beauty 
who would be the best judges of utility. 
But experience shows that utilitarians 
have generally no taste for beauty, while 
the admirers of beauty are usually poor 
judges of utility. Hence, countries like 
our own, in which the utilitarian spirit 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 203 

prevails, seldom attain to great eminence 
in the cultivation of the fine arts. More- 
over, according to the system we are re- 
futing, we should first see if any thing be 
useful before pronouncing it to be beau- 
tiful. Now, this does not happen. For 
when the same object is useful and beau- 
tiful, we judge it to be beautiful without 
thinking expressly of its utility. In fact 
we can hardly consider a thing as useful 
without making an abstraction of its 
beauty. For instance, I may look at a 
tree and consider it beautiful without at- 
tending to its utility. But when I begin 
to think that its branches, its wood, may 
serve to make a fire and warm me, the 
tree loses its beauty. And, in like man- 
ner, the symmetry and order of the viands 
disposed on the table for a banquet may 
afford us a beautiful spectacle; but if, 
pressed by hunger, we think how useful 
they are to satisfy the cravings of our ap- 
petite, beauty vanishes and utility takes 
its place. 



204 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

Hence, the useful and the beautiful are 
distinct, and in some way opposed, at 
least as objects of thought. We must 
observe, however, in conclusion, that al- 
though the useful does not constitute the 
foundation of our cesthetical judgments, 
it has often a part in them. For it some- 
times happens that an object, beautiful in 
itself, fails to excite any sesthetical feeling 
in us on account of some injurious pro- 
perty it may possess or because of some 
danger connected with it. In this case 
the aesthetical feeling is kept in the back- 
ground by the injury that is threatened. 
Thus, a man whose house is on fire does 
not think much of the beauty of the con- 
flagration, nor does he contemplate the 
spectacle with SBsthetical feelings, but 
rather his mind is occupied with the loss 
he sustains. But even in this case the 
spectacle of the burning mass does not 
cease to be beautiful if not sublime. 

The next system is that which identi- 
fies beauty wfth novelty or with habitual 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 205 

familiarity. Here we have two systems 
rather than one, for continued familiarity 
is directly opposed to novelty; but we 
discuss both together, as the observations 
to be made on both are alike. 

Regarding the system of novelty, we 
remark that new things naturally please 
us, and gradually, as we become more 
familiar with them, the pleasure first ex- 
perienced decreases, till, after long posses- 
sion, it ends in disgust. 

Beauty then is in novelty and deformity 
in long possession, say the partisans of 
this system. Hence, beauty and deform- 
ity are not qualities inherent in objects; 
they are merely extrinsic and accidental 
relations. 

The partisans of the other system say 
that experience teaches that we are pleas- 
ed with old and familiar things. What 
at first sight displeased us gradually 
grows pleasant to the sight, and hence 
custom or habit is the cause of beauty, 
and novelty the cause of deformity. For 



206 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

instance, the deformity which the Cauca- 
sian race finds in the dark hue of the Af- 
rican's skin is something which would 
entirely disappear by practical miscegena- 
tion. 

Now, we admit the truth of the facts 
alleged by the partisans of these systems, 
but at the same time we deny the infer- 
ence deduced from them. We assert that 
neither novelty nor continued familiarity 
gives the true notion of beauty. We 
shall, however, attempt to show the vari- 
ous effects of novelty and familiarity, and 
reconcile the apparent contradictions al- 
leged by the partisans of each system. 

If beauty were identified either with 
novelty or with familiarity, these three as- 
sertions would be true, namely, first, every 
tiling beautiful should be new or it should 
be old; second, every thing new or every 
tiling old should be beautiful; and third, 
in both systems the beautiful should con- 
sisl in the mere accidental and extrinsic 
relation of objects. But experience shows 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 207 

that these three assertions are false. For, 
in the first place, many things are beauti- 
ful which are not new, which have not 
novelty. For instance, the starry sky, 
which we have been contemplating from 
our childhood. And in fact, many things 
are beautiful to us, because we have been 
long familiar with them, and on the other 
hand, many things are beautiful which 
are not familiar. We see beauty in them 
at the first glance. In the second place, 
all new or familiar things are not beauti- 
ful ; for some new things are indifferent, 
others appear beautiful, and others ugly, 
simply because they are new ; while many 
objects do not appear more beautiful to 
us after long familiarity with them than 
they did when we first became acquainted 
with them. 

Thirdly, we apprehend beauty in the 
object as something absolute, and not de- 
pending on our mind. Thus, a landscape 
in May would be beautiful, though we 
were not living to behold it. Conse- 



208 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

quently beauty does not consist in a 
mere accidental or extrinsic relation of 
objects to each other or to us, and hence 
neither novelty, nor habit, nor custom, nor 
long-continued familiarity constitutes the 
beautiful. 

Yet there are certain sesthetical effects 
produced in the mind by novelty and fa- 
miliarity. Novelty produces two effects 
in the mind. Firstly, it puts the mind 
in a new state of existence. Secondly, it 
excites the mind more vividly in that 
state. Hence, there are as many kinds of 
novelty as tliere are states of the mind. 
Thus, tliere is novelty for the intellect, 
when it begins to know what has hither- 
to been unknown to it, or when it knows 
an object in many ways after having 
known it only in one. And there is no- 
velty for the sensibility when Ave have a 
feeling not experienced before. Hence, 
there may be novelty in our perception 
of objects, whether beautiful, ugly, or de- 
formed. If we ask the reason why the 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 209 

mind is excited so vividly by novelty, the 
answer is, that the vivacity of our affec- 
tions depends upon the degree of atten- 
tion we give the object. If there be inat- 
tention, there will be neither joy nor sor- 
row. Hence, w^hen we wish to divert the 
mind of a friend from grief, we advise 
him not to think of it ; that is to say, not 
to give it his attention. A new object, 
therefore, excites attention, and hence ex- 
cites the mind; but, when we become 
accustomed to the object, our attention 
gradually flags and our mind grows cool. 
Hence, familiarity or custom produces an 
effect directly contrary to that of novelty. 
Should we ask now the cause of these ef- 
fects, we shall find it first, in the nature of 
the object ; and second, in the peculiar dis- 
position of the subject. The object may be 
either pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent. 
If the object be agreeable, then the plea- 
sure caused by it will be greater by nor 
velty and weaker by familiarity. In this 
case undoubtedly novelty is the cause of 



210 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

beauty. But if the object be disagree- 
able in itself, the unpleasant impression 
produced by its novelty will gradually 
melt away with custom or familiarity. 
And if the object be neither agreeable 
nor disagreeable, neither novelty nor fa- 
miliarity will enhance its aesthetic impres- 
sion. As to the other cause of the effect 
of novelty or familiarity, namely, the dis- 
position of the subject, we remark that 
there are two dispositions, apparently op- 
posed, which have great influence on the 
aesthetic taste as to objects new or old. 
One of these dispositions is the love of 
perfectibility; the other the love of re- 
pose. We all desire to be perfect, and 
hence we desire that which may either 
increase our knowledge or our happiness, 
while, at the same time, we love our ease, 
and are naturally averse to labor. But, 
as in the present state of existence, there 
is no perfection possible without toil and 
trouble, our love of ease and desire of 
perfectibility can not be satisfied at the 



CURIOUS QUESTION'S. 211 

same time in this life, and, consequently, 
one must preponderate over the other, 
according to the different temperaments of 
individuals. Hence, one class of men love 
novelty, another dislike or fear it, and 
are pleased only with what is old. In the 
one the love of perfectibility predominates, 
hence they love new things and detest 
routine. Young people are generally of 
this character, for their love of knowledge 
and their activity are great ; while old 
persons, being swayed by the love of re- 
pose, distrust what is new, for they fear 
lest it should trouble their long-cherished 
theories and thus disturb their equanimi- 
ty. The young man is cupidus novi, the 
old one, laudator temporis acti. These 
seem to be the causes of the different ef- 
fects produced by novelty and familiarity 
Let us now endeavor to reconcile the 
opposite facts alleged by the partisans of 
both these systems. It is not difficult to 
conceive how a new object may be more 
beautiful than an old one, and vice versa. 



212 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

In the first place, let us suppose an object 
beautiful in itself to attract our attention. 
We are moved by its beauty, for in know- 
ing it we are perfecting our faculties, and 
our attention is more excited. Indeed, 
in the first instance, we may admire it 
more than it deserves, because we expect 
in it hidden beauties which it has not. 
But in a longer and more careful exami- 
nation, not discovering those beauties, 
and the hopes that were raised being dis- 
appointed, we become displeased, our at- 
tention and admiration grow less, and the 
object partially or completely loses its 
beauty. 

In this case novelty begets beauty and 
familiarity creates deformity. But let us 
suppose, on the other hand, that some- 
thing new makes an unpleasant impres- 
sion on us, or disturbs our tranquillity of 
mind, or attacks our deep-rooted preju- 
dices. Here, though the object should be 
really beautiful, it will not appear so to 
us at first, because of the unpleasant sen- 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 213 

sation it produces being so great as to 
prevent our attention from resting on the 
real beauties of the being. But when, 
by familiarity, the first unpleasant im- 
pression becomes weaker, the beauties 
of the object, at first hidden, gradually 
manifest themselves to our mind, and 
that which at first we considered de- 
formed we begin to think beautiful. 



Question Fourteenth. 

DOES BEAUTY CONSIST IN MAGNITUDE OR 

EXAGGERATION ? IN ILLUSION OR 

IMITATION? 




1HE next system to be discussed 



is that of magnitude or exag- 
geration. There is a certain 
school in art and literature, called the ro- 
mantic, which contends that nothing is 
beautiful which is not exaggerated be- 
yond the ordinary proportions of nature. 
Hence, even in the moral order, great 
crimes and monsters are models of the 
beautiful, notwithstanding the assertion 
of the classic school to the contrary, 
which makes virtue only beautiful and 
vice hideous. The romantic school hold 
that great vice constitutes the beautiful, 
because there is something superhuman 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 215 

in it; and unfortunately, they endeavor 
to realize their theory in both the arts 
and literature. We shall not speak of 
the injurious effect of this system upon 
good morals, as we are not writing on a 
question of ethics but of aesthetics. We 
therefore formulate the following pro- 
position : Beauty does not consist in 
mere magnitude. If it were true that 
beauty consisted in magnitude, then it 
would follow that the greater an object 
is, the more beautiful it would be. But 
experience shows this to be absurd. For 
in the moral order, to which the roman- 
tics love to appeal, are not the little vir- 
tues more beautiful than the great crimes 
against nature? In the second place, 
the romantics destroy the distinction be- 
tween the beautiful and the deformed. 
That such a distinction exists no one can 
deny, for the deformed is the negation of 
the beautiful, and no two things can be 
more different than the positive and the 
negative. Now, if whatever is great 



216 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

must be beautiful, an object of few 
charms or of small deformity could be 
made beautiful by increasing its deform- 
ity to a great degree. And consequently 
the beautiful would be identified with 
the greatest deformity, which is a con- 
tradiction in terms. Again in this system 
every thing great should be beautiful, 
whether good or bad. Now this is ab- 
surd ; for let us suppose a case ; robbery, 
for instance, whether great or small, can 
never make a beautiful action. For you 
can not change the deformity of its es- 
sence, which consists in the unjust taking 
away of an object. Indeed, the deform- 
ity will be increased in proportion to the 
greatness of the crime. Nor can any cir- 
cumstance change its nature ; for instance, 
greatness of mind or the audacity of the 
robber. For although these qualities are 
beautiful in themselves, they can never 
change the nature of the act, which is at 
(lie same time bad and ugly. 

Moreover, it is absurd to suppose that 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 217 

the greatest crimes and the most heroic 
actions are equally beautiful. Individual 
consciousness and the common-sense of 
mankind reject this theory. We can 
never force ourselves to regard the crimes 
of Caligula or Nero as equally beautiful 
with the virtues of Charlemagne, St. 
Henry, or St. Louis. But even a priori 
this system is shown to be false, by 
considering the very nature of exaggera- 
tion and beauty. Beauty is a quality 
inherent in the very nature of the object. 
Magnitude only increases or intensifies 
the object without changing its essence. 
Consequently an object beautiful in it- 
self may have its beauty increased or 
diminished according to its size. But 
the size can not change the nature of the 
object, or make it beautiful if it be de- 
formed or deformed if it be beautiful. 
But it may be objected that there are in 
reality objects deformed in themselves 
which become beautiful by exaggeration ; 
namely, the vice of pride, when person- 



218 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

ified in Milton's Satan, becomes sublime 
and beautiful. But we answer that here 
it is the representation, and not the thing 
itself which is beautiful. For according 
to Boileau, 

"II n'est point de serpents ni de monstre odieux, 
Qui par Tart indite" ne puisse plaire aux yeux." 

Besides, in most of the cases that might 
be alleged by the romantics, we would 
find that it was the great power or intelli- 
gence displayed, rather than the action 
itself, which constituted the beautiful in 
them. 

From the fact that the representation 
of vice or virtue may be beautiful, some 
authors have concluded that beauty con- 
sists entirely in imitation. Hence, for them 
an object is beautiful, if it be a perfect 
representation ; if not, it is ugly. Regard- 
ing this point we may make three in- 
quiries: Firstly, Whether there be any 
beauty at all in imitation? Secondly, 
Whether all beauty be in it? Thirdly, In 
what the beaut)' of imitation consists? 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 219 

There is some heauty in imitation. 
This experience proves. For many nat- 
ural objects, indifferent to our taste in 
themselves, become really beautiful as 
images. Indeed the real attraction of 
the Flemish school of painting comes from 
this. Moreover, even things which are 
deformed in themselves please us when 
represented by art, or at least do not ex- 
cite the same horror as when in their nat- 
ural state. Even objects which are beau- 
tiful in themselves acquire an increase of 
accidental beauty, merely on account of 
their representation. Consequently it 
follows that there is some beauty in imi- 
tation. 

Yet beauty, generally speaking, must be 
distinguished from imitation. For other- 
wise all beauty would consist in imita- 
tion, and then these four consequences 
would follow : Firstly, only works of art 
would be beautiful. Secondly, among the 
works of art only those would be beauti- 
ful which would be imitations. Thirdly, 



220 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

that would be the more beautiful which 
would be the better imitation. Fourthly, 
in these same works there would be no 
other beauty than that which would arise 
from imitation. 

Now these four consequences are ab- 
surd. In the first place, besides works of 
art, other objects are beautiful, namely, 
the ■ human body, the sky, or a meadow 
in summer. Secondly, many works of 
art which are not imitations are beautiful. 
For instance, a palace, a piece of music, a 
painting, or a statue, may be imitations 
of nature, but realizations of the ideal, 
and yet be beautiful. In fact, in some 
works of art imitation may be merely ac- 
cidental in them. Thirdly, of two works 
of art, that one is often judged to be the 
more beautiful in which there is the less 
imitat ion. Take, for instance, two statues 
the one representing a real man, and the 
other an ideal archetype; the latter is 
often the more beautiful. Again, in the 
imitative works of art, there are generally 



CHEIOUS QUESTIONS. 221 

two kinds of beauty or of deformity: 
one consisting in the perfection or the 
imperfection of the imitation, the other 
being entirely distinct from it. For in- 
stance, the picture of a monster will be 
beautiful inasmuch as it imitates ; and de- 
formed inasmuch as it relates to an ugly 
object. If a painter, who wishes to take 
the portrait of a man, makes an image 
unlike his archetype, the picture may not 
be on this account ugly, but very beauti- 
ful, compared to the subject. Conse- 
quently there is another kind of beauty 
besides that of imitation. 

Should we ask now what it is that 
pleases us in imitation, there are two dif- 
ferent opinions on this subject. Some say 
it is the similarity itself, or the illusion 
the image produces in our mind. While 
others deny this and say it is the judg- 
ment which pronounces the imitation to 
be the work of some intelligent being; 
that is to say, we do not admire the imi- 
tation, properly speaking, but the intel- 



222 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

lectual labor which it supposes. It is the 
skill of the artist wliicli pleases us. 

Of these two opinions we reject the 
former and adopt the latter, for the fol- 
lowing reasons : Similarity can not be 
the sense of the pleasure which we feel in 
contemplating the copies of natural things ; 
for if it were so, we should experience the 
same aesthetic savor in beholding similar 
objects in nature. "We should feel the 
same pleasure in seeing, for instance, two 
trees that are alike, as in viewing the 
images of the trees. 

Moreover, the latter opinion is based 
on experience. Suppose an instance. If 
we see two pictures that look alike, they 
may not strike us as beautiful so long as 
we imagine them to be the work of the 
same artist. But when we are told that 
one is the copy of the other, our admira- 
tion is instantly excited. We admire the 
ability of the copyist. We admire the 
effort of one mind to copy the work of 
another. Hence, the greater the skill dis- 



CURIOtlS QUESTIONS. 223 

played in the execution of the work, the 
more beauty shall we perceive in it, on 
account of the greater difficulties to be 
overcome. Thus far then we have ex- 
plained the nature of the aesthetic element 
in works of imitation. Let us now exam- 
ine the next system, namely, that which 
identifies beauty with proportion and 
order of parts. 




Question Fifteenth. 

DOES BEAUTY CONSIST IN PROPORTION AND 
ORDER OF PARTS OR IN UNITY AND 
VARIETY? 

[HE system which identifies beau- 
ty with proportion and order 
of parts is one of the oldest and 
most respected theories on the subject. 
One of its ablest defenders in modern 
times is the Pere Andre in his "Essai sur 
le Beau." The partisans of this system 
understand by order the disposition of 
parts in a being to each other. Thus, 
order in the human body consists in the 
fad that the different members have a 
determined place as parts of the whole. 
And fchis order is the first element of hu- 
man beauty. Thus the nose is in the 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 225 

centre of the face ; tlie eyes are either side 
of it, and the mouth below it, all in order. 
But beauty is not complete without pro- 
portion, its second element. 

Proportion consists in the difference of 
degrees in duration, intensity, or exten- 
sion. Thus in music or dancing there is 
the proportion of duration. For the 
sounds or motions must succeed each 
other in uniform times. We also find in 
music an example of the proportion of in- 
tensity. The notes must not be discor- 
dant, and consequently the number of 
vibrations must be greater or less to effect 
the purpose. Finally, in bodies we have 
the proportion of extension, as in the hu- 
man countenance the length or shortness 
of the features will have relative effects 
on a man's good looks. 

But there are various ways of under- 
standing this system of proportion and 
order of parts. It can not mean that 
every order and proportion will make 
beauty, for then all objects would be 



226 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

beautiful, since in all there are a certain 
order and proportion. It means, there- 
fore, that among all possible orders and 
proportions there is one that necessarily 
makes an object beautiful. But why 
should this order and proportion make 
the beautiful and not the others ? This 
is a question to which four different an- 
swers are given, and which give rise to 
four different opinions. The first holds 
that the cause of this beauty in order and 
proportion is found in the very essence 
of things. That among all possible orders 
there is one which by its very nature is 
absolute order and proportion, and there- 
fore constitutes the beautiful. The second 
opinion gives a subjective origin to the 
beautiful in proportion. It maintains that 
the beautiful of proportion is produced 
in us by a habit or by a peculiar disposi- 
tion of our nature. For instance, the 
hunchback appears ugly to us because 
we arc accustomed to see all other men 
straight. The third opinion places the 



CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 227 

beauty of order and proportion in the 
apt disposition of the parts of the object 
to its end. While the fourth opinion 
maintains that objects, which in them 
selves are neither beautiful nor deformed 
are so inasmuch as they are signs of in- 
visible beauty. We shall speak of this 
last system later. Let us now discuss the 
three first opinions. 

We affirm, in the first place, that no 
order or proportion of parts considered in 
itself, or essentially, can constitute the 
beautiful. It is impossible to find in the 
essence of things one order surpassing 
another ; for all combinations of order or 
proportion are equally indifferent if con- 
sidered independently of any extrinsic re- 
lation. Besides, according to the hypo- 
thesis which we refute, we should be de- 
lighted with the beauty of an object in 
proportion to the degree of knowledge we 
might have of its parts. Hence, to use a 
familiar example, we should be less pleas- 
ed when we merely behold a fine-looking 



228 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

man than when we have a knowledge of 
the proportion of all his parts, as, for in- 
stance, that the circumference of the neck 
is equal to the circumference of the calf 
of his leg. But experience teaches that 
the geometrical measurement instead of 
increasing our aesthetic taste, disgusts us. 
In the third place, if order essentially 
makes beauty, this order must be the 
same for all species of beings, or it must 
be different for different kinds of beings ; 
that is, one species of beauty would con- 
stitute that of a horse, another that of a 
tree, etc. But neither of these two opin- 
ions can be held. If the first supposition 
be true, then we should find the same 
proportion and order in all beautiful ob- 
jects, or at least an approximation to a 
common type. But this contradicts expe- 
rience, for where is the similarity of pro- 
portion between a pretty woman, a fine 
palace, and a beautiful rose? Nor is the 
second hypothesis true; for, if it were, 
then there could be no degrees in beauty 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 229 

— no comparison, because in eacli being 
there would be a proportion of parts that 
would make it perfectly beautiful in its 
kind. 

Thus, the proportion of parts in the 
round, plump, and juicy body of a fat 
partridge would be equally beautiful with 
the most perfect specimen of the Ionian 
style of architecture. From what has 
been thus far seen, it must follow that 
beauty does not consist in any order or 
proportion, which by familiarity or a dis- 
position of our nature would seem beauti- 
ful in itself, since we have shown the ef- 
fects of familiarity in refuting another 
system. 

Nor is the beautiful constituted by 
order and proportion considered in the 
aptness of the parts of a being for attain- 
ing the end of its creation. For if this 
system were true, we should have to ac- 
knowledge the same beauty in all created 
beings ; for there are none of them whose 
parts are not aptly disposed by the Crea- 



230 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

tor to the end for which they were des- 
tined. But this consequence we know to 
be false. Moreover, experience shows the 
contrary of this system to be true ; for the 
form and parts of a hog, for instance, 
might be changed so as to make it more 
beautiful, yet they would not be so well 
adapted to the attaining of its end. 
Again, if beauty consisted in the aptitude 
of the parts of an object to its end, then the 
following absurd consequences would fol- 
low: Firstly, in every judgment regarding 
the beauty of an object, the consideration 
of its end should be first in the order of 
thought. Secondly, we could never pro- 
nounce an object beautiful without know- 
ing the design for which it was created. But 
who does not see the absurdity of these 
two consequences ; for who has ever said 
that a mouth was beautiful because it 
was fitted for eating or speaking \ And 
again, every day we pronounce objects to 
be most beautiful without knowing the end 
for which they were created. Yet although 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 231 

we have said so much against the system 
of order and proportion, it must be ad- 
mitted that they partake of beauty inas- 
much as they show forth the intelligence 
of some agent accommodating beings to 
an end. 

SYSTEM OF UNITY IN VARIETY. 

Some very able philosophers hold that 
beauty consists in variety reduced to uni- 
ty. St. Augustine says, in his 18th Epis- 
tle, " Omnis porro pidchritudinis forma est 
unita$r But to this unity moderns have 
added variety. There may be unity in 
variety in many ways. Thus the various 
phenonomena which take place in the 
same space or time, are said to have unity 
of time or space. Again, there may be 
several modes in a substance, as in the 
soul there are various thoughts and sen- 
timents. This unity in variety may 
exist when several beings have the same 
end, or are adapted to produce the same 
effect. The partisans of this system do 



232 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

not agree in placing this unity in variety 
in any one of these forms. They gener- 
ally explain it, however, according to the 
last example, and, indeed, it is the most 
beautiful kind of nnity. According to 
this system, therefore, a mnsical composi- 
tion is beautiful when the various notes 
and sounds have the same general idea or 
impression ; and the beauty of a poem or 
tragedy consists in the various actions, 
characters, or parts tending to a common 
end or catastrophe. Before discussing the 
claims of this system, let us make two ob- 
servations. In the first place, we remark 
that the system of unity explained accord- 
ing to the third manner, does not differ 
much from the system of order and pro- 
portion taken to express the adaptation 
of parts to the attaining of a common 
end; for order can not exist without the 
accommodation of means to an end. 

Hence, the partisans of the system of 
order and proportion, as Perd Andr6 for 
instance, admit unity as its complement. 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 233 

There is, however, a difference between 
the two systems ; for in the adaptation of 
means to an end, two things may be dis- 
tinguished : First, the intrinsic fitness of 
each part to an end ; and secondly, the har- 
mony of all the parts in producing that 
end. In the first consists the idea of pro- 
portion ; in the second that of unity. We 
observe, in the second place, that the sys- 
tem of unity is the same as the system of 
symmetry, for symmetry is only an effect 
of unity. Having premised these few re- 
marks, let us now discuss the value of 
this system, inasmuch as it pretends to 
give the true explanation of the sublime 
and beautiful. 

We deny that the beautiful is found in 
unity considered in itself. If the contrary 
of this proposition were true, it would 
follow that in all objects which have the 
same unity, we should find the same de- 
gree of beauty. But experience shows 
the contrary to be the case ; for in the 
various works of nature, we find beauties 



23-1 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

the most diverse in degree and kind, yet 
we find unity equally in all. Thus, 
the beauty in the horse and in the ass 
is different ; yet there is the same unity 
in their constitution. The same may be 
said of works of art, for we can conceive 
two poems perfectly equal in unity, 
but not so in beauty. On the other 
hand, the tragedies of Shakespeare have 
less unity in their plan, yet are far more 
beautiful than the more regularly compiled 
works of less capable dramatic authors. 
But although unity in itself does not con- 
stitute beauty, nevertheless it adds to the 
beauty of an object, inasmuch as unity is 
a sign of intellectual labor ; and experi- 
ence teaches that there are no beautiful 
objects which have not more or less of 
unity. Unity is therefore a condition, 
but not the constituent of beauty, and it 
is in this sense we are to understand the 
text of St. Augustine. 




Question Sixteenth. 

is the beautiful the "splendor veri" 
as plato defines it? 

[HE beautiful may "be considered 
in two ways, firstly in external 
and visible forms, as in a pal- 
ace or statue ; secondly, as purely intelli- 
gible, devoid of all sensible representa- 
tion, contemplated by the intellect. We 
mean by the beauty of sensible forms 
that which is represented by the senses. 
Now, if we should ask in what this spe- 
cies of beauty consists, we should receive 
two answers. The first says that beauty 
is in the form itself as one of its charac- 
teristics ; while the second maintains that 
beauty is not in the form, that the form 
is a mere sign by which our mind's eye 



236 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

is enlightened to contemplate the true 
beautiful, which is in the intelligible. 
The systems so far explained adopt the 
first manner of explaining the notion of 
the beautiful ; but, since we have refuted 
them, we can not admit their theory; for 
we understand by the sensible form the 
sensation which it excites, or the total 
representation of the object, which rep- 
resentation consists in the impression of 
our sensibility, and the conception of our 
intellect. But the sensible form con- 
sidered in itself can not be called the 
beautiful regarded in any of the two 
ways of explaining it. It can not be 
called such in the first manner, for wc 
have proved that beauty differs essential- 
ly from the impression. To call it so in 
the second manner is equally impossible 1 ; 
for the intellectual conceptions which 
added to the impression can all bo reduced 
to the ideas of order and unity. But we 
have already shown that neither order 
nor unify in itself makes the beautiful, 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 237 

although they are both conditions of 
beauty. External forms are, therefore, 
the signs of invisible beauty according 
to the second hypothesis which .we ad- 
mit. They are symbols or types of in- 
visible beauty. Let us now develop 
and explain this system, by examining 
the following questions : Firstly, "What 
is a symbol ? Secondly, Are all sensible 
forms symbols ? Thirdly, Is their sym- 
bolism the foundation of all their aesthe- 
tic properties ? Fourthly, How may the 
beauty or deformity of objects be deter- 
mined by their symbolism ? Let us an- 
swer the first question on the nature and 
division of symbols. A symbol is a sen- 
sible phenomenon exciting in us the idea 
of a reality. For instance, the figure 
with the balance in her hand is a symbol 
of justice and equity. There are many 
kinds of symbols, divided according to the 
principle of their origin, their clearness, or 
their determination. The principle of 
symbolism is the association of ideas and 



23S CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

sensations; and hence there may be as 
many kinds of symbols as there are 
modes of associating ideas and sensations. 
Thus there are natural symbols, arbitrary 
symbols, and symbols of custom, as there 
may be a natural, arbitrary, or customary 
association of ideas. As to their clear- 
ness, symbols are divided into clear and 
obscure, according as their meaning is 
discovered with ease or difficulty. But 
this clearness is not absolute but relative ; 
for a symbol which may be obscure to 
one may be very clear to another. Thus 
symbols derived from the manners or reli- 
gion of a people, are very intelligible to 
them, though quite obscure to others. A 
more particular application of this prin- 
ciple may be found in the symbolism of 
the Catholic Church, well understood 
within its pale, though not outside of it. 
As to the degree of determination of 
symbols, they are either vague or specific 
Vague symbols express something in a 
general way; for instance, a passion or 



CURIOUS QUESTION^. 239 

state of the mind, as joy or sadness, with- 
out particularizing any thing. Specific 
symbols express the thing with circum- 
stances. Some symbols are vague by 
their very nature, as in music; others 
are essentially specific, as in painting; 
while others again, as words in language, 
are either vague or specific at will. It is 
not difficult to prove that all sensible 
things are symbols of invisible things; 
for the sensible phenomena of nature may 
be reduced to sounds, colors, lines, and 
motions. All sounds have reference to 
the ear, while the three last in the cate- 
gory are seen by the eye. But all these 
express something invisible, for they all 
have the power of expressing the invis- 
ible. We might even prove the symbol- 
ism of sensible things by an a priori ar- 
gument, for all of them show forth a de- 
gree of being. They manifest modifica- 
tions of an active force, but the active 
force is invisible. Hence sensible forms are 
symbols of the invisible. But it will now 



240 Curious questions. 

be asked, In what does this invisible con- 
sist? We answer that the invisible, ex- 
pressed by sensible forms in creation, is of 
- two kinds ; the first consists in some qual- 
ity, property, or attribute of the Author of 
being, as when, for instance, the Scripture 
says, " The skies tell the glory of God ;" 
or as when a well-executed picture shows 
the skill of the artist. It requires reflec- 
tion, however, on our part to perceive 
this invisible. The oilier part of the in- 
visible symbolized, by sensible forms, con- 
sists in moral qualities ; as, when, either 
by nature or from consent, certain sen- 
sible signs are used to express invisible 
beings. They express, in the first place, 
undetermined being, or being in general ; 
and in the second place, they express 
such and such a degree of being, which 
it is sometimes very difficult to appre- 
hend. 

Yet we always find that the foundation 

of the aesthetic properties in sensible be- 

is their symbolism, [f we examine 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 241 

closely the relation between the force of 
expression in beings, and tlieir power of 
exciting aesthetic feelings, we shall find 
them to be identical. In the first place, 
objects please us in proportion to their 
power of expression ; and, as we descend 
in the scale of creation, we find the beau- 
ty of beings grow less as we descend in 
species. Animals are more beautiful than 
plants, and plants more beautiful than 
minerals. Moreover, if we consider the 
same thing in two different states of a be- 
ing, in that one in which it will have the 
greater expression it will certainly be more 
beautiful. Thus as there is a great differ- 
ence between the power of expression in 
the face of a living and of a dead man, 
so there is a difference in their beauty. 
Again, some objects please us only after a 
time, when we become familiar with them. 
Pleasure in beholding them commences 
only when we begin to understand their 
meaning. Experience also teaches that 
those men who appreciate the symbolism 



242 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

of beings the best are the most capable 
of perceiving their beauty. Thus many 
natural objects, whose beauty poets and 
artists feel vividly, move not in the least 
the rustic mind. The rustic looks only at 
the utility of the object, and cares not for 
its expression, while the poet and the 
artist admire its expression. Hence, there 
is truth in saying that it is the poet and 
the artist that give sense and beauty to 
inanimate things. Even if we observe 
the impression which inanimate things 
produce in us, we shall find that it is not 
the form or external shape that pleases us 
in nature or in art, but that which it ex- 
presses. In a church, for instance, it is 
the religious expression of the arches and 
columns ; or the nobility, the majesty, be- 
nevolence, and generosity, expressed by 
the statues or paintings representing hu- 
man forms that excite in us emotions of 
beauty. Tn fact, the words we use on be- 
holding such objects refer less to them 
than to their expression. 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 243 

But let us now inquire how the de- 
formity or beauty of objects is determined 
by their symbolism. Upon this question 
there are two opinions. The first main- 
tains that beauty and deformity are joined 
in beings in proportion to their power of 
expression; that is to say, an object is 
beautiful that can give expression, and 
deformed when there is no expression in 
it. The partisans of the second system 
hold that beauty or deformity consists in 
the thing expressed, and not in the thing 
expressing. Objects are beautiful or de- 
formed because they express this or that 
idea. Of these two opinions we must 
admit the latter, for the former would 
lead tfs into absurdities. It would, in the 
first place, make us maintain that every 
object which expresses something is beau- 
tiful ; and again, that two objects having 
equal expression have equal beauty. It 
is not difficult to show the absurdity of 
these consequences. In the first place, 
experience teaches that beings which ex^ 



241 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

press nothing are not therefore deformed, 
since there are many things in the world 
indifferent with respect to beauty. But 
this could not be the. case in the opinion 
we refute ; for according to it beings should 
have expression and therefore be beauti- 
ful, or they should be deprived of expres- 
sion and therefore ugly, so that there 
could be no such thing as sesthetical in- 
difference. Nor can it be objected that 
there are objects in which a defect of ex- 
pression implies a defect of beauty; as, 
for instance, a poem or a statue may have 
no value as a work of art. It is not on this 
account deformed in the true sense of the 
word; and even if it were deformed, this 
would prove nothing against us ; for its 
deformity would not arise from a want 
of expression, but of the true expression ; 
it would arise from the defective skill or 
genius of the maker. Again, it is false 
that beauty is found in every object that 
expresses something. The face of a mon- 
key is \eiy expressive, but certainly not 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 245 

beautiful, and so is tlie face of a drunk- 
ard or a man excited by anger ; yet 
none of tliese lias beauty. It is equally 
false that two objects having equal ex- 
pression have equal beauty. We can 
show this by taking two works of art, 
two statues, for instance, one representing 
the passion of anger, the other the virtue 
of purity. Each has great expression, 
they may both have equal expression ; but 
certainly their beauty will not be equal. 
Take, for example, the statue of Silenus 
and that of Abraham ; the one represent- 
ing drunkenness, the other the great pa- 
triarch about to offer up his only son to 
God. They may have equal expression, 
but certainly not equal beauty. Beauty, 
therefore, consists in the invisible type 
expressed by the sensible form. Let us 
now examine the qualities and character- 
istics of invisible beauty. What is this 
invisible beauty ? And what are the con- 
ditions required that it should affect us 
aesthetically ? According to Plato, beauty 



246 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

is the splendor veri. That winch is true 
is beautiful, and objects will be more or 
less beautiful in proportion to their de- 
gree of participation in the reality of God 
who is truth itself. We must admit this 
theory of Plato for many reasons. For a 
supreme rule of beauty must be admitted, 
and this supreme rule must be God. In 
our judgment upon beings, when we say 
that some are more beautiful than others, 
we acknowledge a supreme rule of beauty. 
For when we compare objects as greater 
and less, we suppose an absolute rule ; for 
that which is relative implies the abso- 
lute, and greater and less are relative 
terms. There is then an absolute rule of 
beauty, which is absolute beauty itself. 
What then are the properties of this ab- 
solute rule of beauty? We answer, it 
must be eternal, necessaiy, and infinite. 
It must be independent of time, place, 
and circumstances. 

For example, the act of a man under- 
going martyrdom for conscience sake is 



CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 247 

beautiful in itself, independently of all 
circumstances ; it is eternally beautiful ; 
and as this rule is eternal, it must be ne- 
cessary and unchangeable. This absolute 
rule of beauty is also infinite ; for if it 
were merely finite, a higher type of beauty 
than it could be conceived, and therefore 
it would not be the supreme rule of 
beauty. Besides, as this rule is beauty 
itself, without limit or restriction, it is in- 
finite. This invisible beauty, therefore, 
being absolute, eternal, and infinite, is 
God. Beauty is, therefore, identified 
with truth, and the truth of existing 
beings is conceived in two ways : Firstly, 
inasmuch as they are imitations of 
ideas which exist in God ; and secondly, 
as possessing liberty of will, and acting 
in conformity with the will of God. The 
first manner gives us real truth ; the sec- 
ond, voluntary truth or moral goodness. 
Henoe there are two kinds of beauty, essen- 
tial and moral. Now beauty in beings 
can be considered either absolutely or relr 



248 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

atively / absolutely, when their activity or 
the evolution of tlieir existence is com- 
pared with the infinite activity of God ; 
relatively, when they are compared with 
individuals of the same species. Thus, 
when we say that man is superior to the 
beast, we compare beings according to 
infinite activity ; and when we say that 
one man is more beautiful than another, 
there is question of relative beauty. 

Now, deformity is the want of beauty 
which should exist ; but the want of es- 
sential beauty, or beauty of essence, is not 
deformity ; for if it were, all finite beings 
would be in a certain measure deformed, 
since they are all below the infinite stand- 
ard of real beauty or God. 

Deformity exists then only where there 
is a want of moral beauty, and conse- 
quently of voluntary truth ; or when rel- 
ative essential beauty is wanting as, for 
instance, where one man is deformed, he 
lacks the beauty which belongs to his 
species, beauty which should exist but is 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 249 

wanting, and winch, therefore, begets de- 
formity. Hence sensible forms are beau- 
tiful only when they express moral or es- 
sential invisible beauty. The figure, 
then, which represents the human coun- 
tenance will be beautiful in proportion to 
the majesty, benevolence, generosity, and 
other amiable dispositions portrayed ; 
and deformed in proportion as it expresses 
a want of virtue. But it may be objected 
against our theory, that an ugly face often 
carries a fine mind, and therefore it is 
not true that sensible forms are beautiful 
only when they express invisible beauty. 
To this we answer that the form may 
often express a different thing from that 
to which it is joined. The spirit of a 
demon may dwell in the body of a dog ; 
hence this objection does not contradict 
our theory. At any rate, the objection 
only gives us an exceptional case in na- 
ture ; for, as a rule, the face is an index 
to the mind and character, just as the 
sound in the musical composition of 



250 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

a great artist is ever an eclio of the 
sense. 

All created beauty, then, as well as all 
created truth, and goodness, is derived 
from God. God is the fulcrum on which 
both the psychological and ontological 
scales of philosophy depend. He is the 
alpha and omega of philosophy as of the- 
ology ; He is the beginning and the end. 




Question Seventeenth. 

ARE THERE BUT TWO REAL CAUSES IN THE 
WORLD— MAN AND GOD ? 

[HERE is a system in philosophy 
that has some affinities with that 
of Berkeley and Kant, but which 
is nevertheless substantially distinct from 
them. It is called the system of occa- 
sional causes. Its partisans are Male- 
branche and Leibnitz ; but Leibnitz gives 
it another name and new modifications. 
He calls it the system of preestablished 
harmony. The fundamental tenets of this 
system are : 1st, that only God can act 
outside of ourselves ; 2d, that all other 
beings are incapable of exercising any 
influence on each other; 3d, that it is 
God who produces all the modifications 
in all created substances; so that neither 



252 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

man's thoughts, nor his volitions, nor his 
sensations, nor any other of his acts is 
caused by any external finite being, but 
only by the immediate and direct action 
of God on his soul. He is, as it were, a 
harp placed in the hands of God, and 
only God's fingers can touch this harp 
and awake its latent harmony. These 
principles, if true, lead to extraordinary 
consequences ; for it will not be then mere 
poetry to say that the voice of God is 
heard in the rustling of the wind or the 
roaring of the thunder ; that his omnrpo- 
tence appears in the upheavings of the 
ocean; that his majesty is emblemed in 
the cloud-capped mountains, and his 
beauty manifested in the flowery prairies ; 
but all will be philosophic truth. Ac- 
cording to this system, created things are 
only causes of their own internal acts ; 
and especially with regard to their influ- 
ence on each other, they are mere occa- 
sions; hence, it is not the fire that pro- 
duces the sensation of heat, it is God, and 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 253 

tlie fire is but an occasion, and so on. In 
an especial manner can this system be 
applied to tlie reciprocal action of soul 
and body. Tlie body does not act on tlie 
soul, it is God; since tlie soul and tlie 
body are causes only of tlieir internal 
acts, and with, regard to the external act 
they are but occasions. Leibnitz supposes 
that the soul and the body were created 
in such a manner that the actions of the 
one would necessarily awake harmonious 
echoes in the other, as if two clocks were 
connected by a chain, and then, after hav- 
ing been wound up, were set in motion by 
the maker, so that every stroke in the 
one would cause a harmonious stroke in 
the other, and all this in virtue of a pre- 
established harmony between them. This 
modification which Leibnitz gave the sys- 
tem of occasional causes can not be ad- 
mitted, for it destroys free-will; though 
there is nothing in the system, as it is 
given by Malebranche, that would abso- 
lutely prevent its admission. The differ 



251 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

ence between this system and that of 
Berkeley and Kant is easily seen. Berkeley 
and Kant deny the existence of bodies. 
Malebranche, on the contrary, admits the 
existence of bodies, but denies their im- 
mediate influence. He argues that God 
creates us in act at every instant of our 
lives. The modifications produced in our 
souls are caused by God. Creatures can 
not cause these ; for if they did, creatures 
could create. A modification in the soul 
is a creation of something new, not exist- 
ing before, and no creature can have the 
power of producing such an effect. 

From the questions thus far treated we 
are led to conclude that there are but 
two beings in the universe that can pro- 
duce their own acts — God and man. 
Man's acts are those of his will rather 
than those of his intellect. He should be 
defined to be, therefore, not so much a 
rational animal as an animal possessing 
free-will. 

Intellect does not specifically distin- 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 255 

guish man from tlie rest of creation. 
All creatures liave a certain amount of 
intellectual life. The elements of matter 
are spiritual. Properly speaking, there 
is no such thing in the world as matter 
understood in the vulgar sense of the 
word. The elements of matter are sim- 
ple. Their coexistence it is which makes 
extension. They all participate in the 
divinity, and hence have something of 
the being of God. Now in God all is 
spiritual. All * creatures are therefore 
spiritual, and participate in different de- 
grees of intelligence. Intelligence, there- 
fore, is not the specific attribute of man. 
Nor is sensibility. He has less of it in 
many cases than brutes. The mother's 
love for her child is not essentially differ- 
ent from that of the brute for its young. 
In both it is instinct ; sensibility, there- 
fore, does not specifically distinguish man 
from the rest of creation ; but will does. 
It is the will that makes the man. Man 
has free-will, and in this he is most like 



256 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

God. It is this will that constitutes liim 
lord of creation. It is his power of 
choosing his own acts that makes him 
above all created earthly beings, makes 
him a mystery in creation. He is not 
the mere occasion of his volitions, but 
their real cause. How he is so is a mys- 
tery which no human intellect can solve. 
The mystery of free-mil, the mystery of 
creation, and the mystery of ideal intui- 
tion are three in one. They are the 
trinity in unity of philosophy ; the three 
great mysteries of the natural order, all 
centring in the grand mystery of creation, 
or distinction between God and the uni- 
verse. 

We shall now conclude our work by an 
investigation into the spirit of the age. Our 
views/set forth in this investigation, when 
compared with those preceding it, may 
show that the study of metaphysics, so 
far from injuring Christian faith, serves 
only to make it stronger. 




Question Eighteenth. 

why is the spirit of the age anti-chris- 
tian and anti-philosophic ? 

[VERY man given to reflection 
must notice something in the 
spirit of the age not in accord 
with the spirit of true philosophy. There 
is a tendency in our century to act con- 
trary to the spirit of religion; and this 
tendency manifests itself in education as 
well as in action; in the school, in the 
senate-chamber, in law and politics. This 
anti-christian, which is the anti-philosophic 
spirit, is the offspring of what may "be 
called a tendency to paganism. "We are 
reviving paganism in every thing. There 
is a great difference, however, between 
ancient and modern paganism; and yet 
in idea and tendencies they are the same. 



258 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

Our modern pagans do not, it is true, 
adore statues of Jupiter, Venus, and Bac- 
chus ; but they render worship to the 
ideas of those false deities. There are no 
sacrifices of human bodies, but there are 
of human minds. Two of the old augurs 
could not meet without smiling at each 
other's knavery; yet our modern priests of 
paganism, with the greatest gravity, incul- 
cate their doctrines and believe in their 
truth. There is a revival of defunct paganism 
manifested in false history and philoso- 
phy, and in attempts to do away with the 
necessity of revelation and redemption. 
Men preach the doctrine of human per- 
fectibility; that nature alone suffices to 
itself, and that Christianity should not 
interfere with its action. The intellect is 
all-powerful. In Germany it has created 
God in the school of Fichte and Sehel- 
ling. We have doctors who preach the 
sufficiency of natural religion, like Jules 
Simon ; and others who make out Christ 
a myth or an impostor, like Ernest Kenan ; 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS* 259 

and others who teach the necessity of 
civil Christianity, like the so-called libera- 
tors of Italy. In short, modern paganism 
is like the ancient in all but idolatry. 
We should have, however, even this beau- 
ty of paganism among us were it not for 
the fact that men living under the influ- 
ence of Christianity can never throw away 
completely all their Christian education. 
It has often been noticed that the exist- 
ence and unity of the Church is the indi- 
rect cause of the non-dissolution of secta- 
rian Christianity. All sects unite in their 
opposition to the Church; and if this 
cause of vitality were removed, they would 
shortly decompose in virtue of the princi- 
ple of dissolution which is at the bottom 
of them all. For this same reason there 
can be no thorough infidel in a Christian 
community. Christian Catholic ideas are 
afloat around him, and he can not drown 
them. They enter his mind even against 
his will. He breathes in Christian air, 
and it helps to give him life. Hence, 



260 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

modern paganism is a monstrous medley 
of Christian ideas with pagan inclinations 
and intentions. The radical principle of 
paganism is pride, which preaches the 
self-sufficiency of human nature, and leads, 
consequently, to the entire separation of 
man from his Creator. When this sepa- 
ration took place, two conclusions natu- 
rally followed ; man lost self-knowledge; 
and no longer understood the end for 
which the inferior beings of creation were 
produced. 

Nothing in nature is explicable without 
the idea of the Creator; this idea is the 
keystone of all knowledge. It explains 
every tiling. But when man lost it, every 
thing became a mystery to him. He 
thought by separating himself from God 
lie would become free, as Adam thought 
he would acquire more knowledge by 
eating the forbidden fruit and become as 
a god ; but instead of freedom he found 
slavery; instead of true knowledge he 
lost much of what he had hitherto pos- 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 261 

sessed. He was created above nature, 



but by separation from God he became 
nature's serf, the bondsman of creatures, 
the slave of his senses and passions. Sla- 
very was introduced into the family and 
into the state, and man forgot his dig- 
nity. He introduced vice in the seat of 
virtue, and made idols of his base pas- 
sions. This was the consequence of man's 
separation from God, the fruit of his self- 
sufficiency. 

St. Thomas in his " Summa Theologica," 
asks himself the question, Why the Re- 
deemer did not come into the world soon- 
er ? Why did he not choose to be born 
immediately after the fall, instead of 
waiting till forty centuries after that 
event ? And the great doctor gives 
this answer ; he says God wished to 
let man try his natural strength, to see 
what he could effect. God wished to 
let man learn a lesson in humility from 
the proof of the incapacity of his nature 
for any thing great or virtuous derived 



262 CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 

from so long an experience. Yet even 
four thousand years did not suffice to 
teach, that great lesson ; for even in the 
nineteenth century after the coming 
of Christ men seem to be still ignorant 
of the weakness of their natural forces. 
This self-sufficiency is directly opposed to 
the economy of redemption ; it is the re- 
fusal of the helper, Christ, and of his 
Church. In ancient paganism, therefore, 
we find what human nature does when 
left to itself; and yet not altogether to 
itself. For the ancient pagans had many 
revealed traditions which were carried 
away by the different peoples at the con- 
fusion of tongues in the building of 
Babel. Paganism was the continuation 
of Adam's sin; it was egotism, natur- 
alism ; the substitution of human nature 
in the place of God. St. Jerome tells us 
that paganism was symbolized in the 
parable of the prodigal son. Whether 
fchia be true of ancient paganism or not, 
it certainly applies very aptly to modern 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 263 

paganism. Our modern pagans leave 
tlie house of their parent, the Church of 
Christ, and they go into a far off country, 
and they are obliged to feed on husks. 
They separate themselves as much as pos- 
sible from God, by sundering religion 
from civil government; the temporal 
from the eternal ; literature and the arts 
from religious influence. They make us 
a history without admitting a divine pro- 
vidence. They make us natural politics, 
natural morality, natural economy, and 
they exclude the supernatural from their 
philosophy. In a word, they separate 
faith from reason, earth from heaven ; and 
the consequence is, that they feed on 
husks. They speak, write, and act like 
pagans. They praise the material profi- 
ciency of a country, and call it flourishing, 
though it be an enemy of truth and of 
Christianity. In their ideas a man may 
be a gentleman without religion. The 
principle of sectarian Christianity is iden- 
tical with that of paganism, for sectarian- 



264: CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

ism is autology or self- worship. Reli- 
gious self-sufficiency is, therefore, a help- 
er of pagan naturalism. Hence in many 
countries the old traditions of Christian 
faith have been rejected by the govern- 
ments; hospitals, churches, and universi- 
ties have been secularized, and religion 
thrown in the background as if it were 
merely of secondary importance. The 
strangest feature in modern paganism is 
that men of intellect and rank are among 
its greatest supporters ; yet it does not 
require much logic to discover its absurd- 
ity. God had but one end in view in 
creating this world of ours ; and man, the 
lord of creation, has but one end also. 
Yet there are two orders, the natural and 
supernatural; but, not separate though 
they are distinct. They are distinct in 
nature, and in the beings that constitute 
each ; but they have the same ultimate 
end, though their proximate ends are of- 
ten different. The ultimate end of all 
things is God: the ultimate end of man 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 265 

is the possession of God. As far then as 
man is concerned, both nature and grace 
tend to the one ultimate end; nature 
leading to it by being subordinate to 
grace. These are elementary principles 
of theology and even of philosophy. 
For how could it be otherwise ? If you 
admit the existence of the supernatural 
order, as a fact, which is as incontrovert- 
ible as the existence of the natural order, 
you must admit the relation of subordina- 
tion of which we speak. The lower or- 
der must be subordinate to the higher, 
because nature must obey grace ; the nat- 
ural order must be subservient to the su- 
pernatural. Hence the state is below the 
church; the temporal is inferior to the 
eternal ; religion must hold the first place 
in all things, as it is it that tends most 
directly to the ultimate end of creation, 
and it is through religion, that is, through 
Christ, that all other creatures attain 
their ultimate end. A system that would 
put the orders of grace and nature on the 



266 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

same footing is as a"bsurd as one that 
would make grace obey nature, or even 
deny its existence altogether. God would 
never create two perfectly equal moral 
forces for the pleasure of witnessing their 
continual struggle. He has made all 
things in order, and hence he has made 
the natural subservient to the super- 
natural order,' just as in Christ, the ex- 
emplar of creation, there are two natures ; 
but the human is subservient to the di- 
vine, and both are made one in their end 
by the divine Person who rules both. 
Any system, therefore, is pagan in prin- 
ciple which separates the state from the 
church, or makes the temporal equal to 
spiritual. Autolatria, or sectarianism, is 
pagan, for the reason that every man is 
his own God, for he is his own judge of 
faith. 

This spirit of modern paganism extols 
ancient paganism, its theories and inspi- 
rations; and decries Christianity, its arts 
and sciences, its doctrine and moral code. 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 267 

Gibbon is one of its incarnations. He 
Las many disciples. Tliey often assert 
facts that are true, but derive from tliem 
conclusions tliat are false. It is true 
that, in a mere material point of view, 
Greece and Rome produced works of art 
or exercised influence unknown to any 
Christian nation. Christianity may not 
have produced a poet like Homer, an 
orator like Demosthenes, or a sculptor 
like Phidias. But this proves nothing 
against Christianity, nor should it cause 
us to desire a revival of ancient paganism. 
The end of man is not to write poetry or 
make statues, and hence the civilization 
and progress of a people are not to be esti- 
mated according to their excellence in 
literature or sculpture. Religion is the 
only true civilizer. The index of true 
progress is the state of morality; the 
knowledge of God and of moral obliga- 
tions. True progress does not reject the 
arts and sciences ; but it keeps them in 
their proper place, it makes them of 



268 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

secondary importance. Progress is ten- 
dency to an end. Human progress is 
tendency to the end of man, to God, by 
means of true religion. If this assertion 
be true, then we can not admire so much 
the civilization of the ancient Greeks and 
Romans. They were ignorant of the true 
religion ; they had false notions of God 
and of man's destiny. They admitted 
that the greatest science was the know- 
ledge of self, and they had an aphorism to 
that effect, yvuOe aeavrov. But what was 
their self-knowledge ? They were igno- 
rant of the destiny of man's soul ; they 
doubted its immortality; the}' were un- 
certain of the existence of a future state ; 
and their greatest philosophers were un- 
able to answer those simple questions 
regarding God and the soul which the 
Christian child of eleven summers can 
now solve with the greatest facility, 
Arnobius -peaks of this ignorance when 
he says: "Potesl quispiam explicare mor- 
laliiiin id quod Socrates ille explicare 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 2G9 

necjiiit ill Phsedone ? liomo quid sit ? uncle 
sit ? in quos usus prolatus sit? cujus sit 
excogitatus ingenio ? quid in mundo 
faciat ? Cur maloruni tanta experiatur 
examina ?"*< And Lactantius tells us tliat 
they only told the trutli when tliey ad- 
mitted their complete ignorance regarding 
the most necessary knowledge. "JSTun- 
quam illi tam veridici faerunt quam cum 
sententiam de sua ignorantia dederunt V J 
Div. Ins. m. 2. Pagan excellence is the 
excellence of matter and sense. Pagan art 
could form the statue of a nude Venus, 
Ibut never create the likeness of a chaste 
Madonna ; their excellence was devoid of 
the true ideal ; they were masters in the 
art of war and in the efforts of imagina- 
tion, but they fell far below the standard 
of human dignity, on the score of moral- 



* " Can any of them explain what Socrates was unable 
to explain in Pha3do ? What is man ? Whence does he 
come ? For what purpose was he created ? What has 
he to do in the world ? Why does he suffer so many 
ills?" 



270 CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 

ity and intellectual trutli. Their great- 
est god was a libertine, as Ovid tells us. 
" Quam multas matres fecerit ille Deus." 
Why then laud so much ancient pagan- 
ism, when its only excellence was mate- 
rial progress? If material ingenuity is to 
be the measure of greatness, is not man 
surpassed by the lower animals ? He can 
make no edifice so perfect in architecture 
as the hive of the bee or the cell of the 
beaver. He can produce no music equal 
to the warbling of the canary or the 
nightingale; even an inanimate machine 
will surpass him in some respects. The 
light of the sun in the camera of the 
photographer will produce the likeness 
of the human countenance in a few sec- 
onds more exactly than all mankind could 
ever effect. Yet it is for the sake of 
material progress that many wish to re- 
vive ancient paganism. The cause of 
the success of paganism in the material 
order is easily accounted for. The pagan 
mind was imbedded in sense ; it knew no- 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 271 

thing of the life to come, or not enough 
to make it give special attention to the 
future state. Its principle was the Epi- 
curean one of Horace, " Carpe cliern," en- 
joy the present : 

11 Pluck the rosebud while you may ! 
Old Time is ever flying ; 
The bud that blooms for thee to-day, 
To-morrow may be dying." 

Hence the attention of pagan genius 
was paid solely to the present life, to mat- 
ter, to sense, and not to the ideal, spiritual, 
or supersensible. Hence materialism and 
paganism are twin sisters. It is no wonder, 
then, that the pagans succeeded in this 
world, since all their attention was direct- 
ed to it. But how deplorable was their 
moral condition may be seen from the fact 
that slavery existed everywhere ; and that 
Aristotle taught that it was both ration- 
al and necessary. These, then, were some 
of the effects of that separation from God 
which constitutes the essence of paganism 
whether ancient or modem. 



272 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

The same effects show themselves now 
in many countries of the world. The re- 
vival of pagan ideas has had many sup- 
porters in Europe and America. The 
theories and theorizers that have been 
disturbing the good order of society in 
Europe for many years — socialists, phi- 
lanthropists, pantheists — are men imbued 
with pagan ideas. The ideas of Eu- 
rope before what is called in France 
the " Renaissance," were for the most 
part Christian, but since that period pa- 
gan ideas have become prevalent. Too 
much attention began to be given to mere 
profane literature. The classics were 
studied at the expense of the catechism, 
and gradually men's thoughts became im- 
bued with the pagan spirit ; sound phi- 
losophy was neglected; men could not 
reason clearly because they were not well 
grounded in the first principles of things. 
Thus modern paganism came into exist- 
once, and it still flourishes. It was the 
ruling spirit of the first French revolution, 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 273 

and was impersonated by tlie u Goddess 
of Reason." It has filled Germany and 
France with, false philosophy ; we can see 
its traces in the works of Fichte, Schelling, 
Cousin, and Jules Simon. It has been 
working mischief in England for the 
last two centuries; it has disturbed the 
peace of Italy — filled that beautiful land 
with demagogues, radicals, and brigands; 
it has even laid sacrilegious hands on the 
crown of the great Pontiff of Christianity. 
Indeed it seems to us as if modern pagan- 
ism were impersonated in the spirit of 
opposition to the temporal power of the 
Pope; for this opposition is essentially un- 
christian. It aims at the destruction of 
civil government, the rights of justice, 
the law of God and of man. All justice- 
loving men admit this. The opposers of 
the temporal power start from the pagan 
principle of separation of the temporal 
from the spiritual ; they are either bigots 
or infidels, or vain and frothy theorizers, 
or corrupt politicians, or Machiavelian 



274 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

statesmen, or restless demagogues; and if 
they be Christians, their faith sits as light- 
ly on their conscience as a feather on the 
back of a whirlwind; they are all per- 
vaded by the pestilential spirit of modern 
paganism. When a government becomes 
indifferent in religious matters, wishes to 
assume supreme control over the asylums 
of suffering humanity, secularizes churches 
and schools, caring only for the mere lit- 
erary or arithmetical education of its sub- 
jects; when it makes laws infringing on 
the rights of conscience or property; 
when it interferes with the sacraments 
and the rites of the Church, then it is pa- 
gan in spirit. It endeavors to prevent 
men from attaining the end of creation; 
it ceases to be a free government, or ful- 
fill the end for which all governments 
were instituted. Practical applications 
of these assertions will not fail to present 
themselves to the mind of the serious 
reader. It is this spirit of paganism 
which threatens to overturn all order in 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 275 

society. In ancient pagan nations, where 
the poor were comparatively ignorant, 
and lience did not know tlieir rights, it 
was easy to hold them in bondage ; but 
now things have changed. Discontent in 
the lower orders of society can no longer 
be smothered ; education has become gen- 
eral, and, "anfortiinately, that element, 
without which it is doubtful whether sci- 
ence be a boon or a curse, has been omit- 
ted. Religious education has been sep- 
arated from secular instruction. Without 
religion the poor are unable to control 
their passions or bear their hard lot. 
They see wealth around them, and with- 
out religion they see no reason why it 
should not be divided among them. "Why 
should they starve while their neighbors 
roll in splendor and luxury? If the 
poor were ignorant, they might not ob- 
serve the disproportion between their con- 
dition and that of the aristocracy, nor 
feel it so keenly. But they are partially 
educated, they feel their power, and not 



276 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

having the restraining influence of reli- 
ct o 

gion to console them, tliey use this pow- 
er. They have done so in Paris ; and if 
they do not always succeed, it is only the 
bayonet that prevents them. This is one 
of the dangers of modern paganism, the 
subversion of stable governments; the 
effect of unchristian education. It is pa- 
ganism in education which begets restless- 
ness among the masses, so that "Nemo 
contentus sorte sua vivat." Those, there- 
fore, who have been so strong in defend- 
ing the system of pagan education 
adopted "in the state schools of Prussia, 
England, and our own country, can hardly 
have reflected on the pernicious tendency 
of those institutions. Even the reading 
of the Bible, the great book of Christian- 
ity, will not counterbalance the danger- 
ous results of pagan education. Under 
this system the child learns everything 
but the law of God; he unlearns in the 
society of the school what lie had learned 
from his parents. lie may have certain 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 277 

general ideas of right and wrong, cer- 
tain vague ideas regarding Christianity 
and the economy of redemption; but 
there is nothing solid in his mind, nothing 
fixed. He does not learn to understand 
correctly any one dogma of the Christian 
dispensation. His mind is a religious va- 
cuum, or at least there is but a religious 
mist in His intellect. What does he learn 
under a pagan system of education that 
will press down his rising passions ? 
"What precept of positive virtue ? "What 
principle of self-restraint? What does 
he learn in a school removed from direct 
and positive religious influence to make 
him obedient, honest, chaste, a good cit- 
izen and a good Christian ? Experience 
is teaching us every day the dire effects 
of paganism in education ; it begets pa- 
ganism in religion. Yes, the age is pa- 
ganizing Christianity. Christianity is a 
positive religion, with a fixed code of 
dogmatic truths and moral principles. 
The religion of Christ, the supreme truth, 



278 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

could not be a vaime and unfinished reli 
gion. He tauglit virtue by facts ; He re- 
vealed dogmas that should be received 
as facts ; his moral principles are facts ; 
men should receive them. He made the 
Church their guardian; men should re- 
ceive truth through the hands of the 
Church. But the contrary spirit is 
sj>reading now. Christianity, if you ex- 
cept its Catholic form, is paganized. 
From the pulpit preachers hold forth 
against dogmas and precepts. Religion 
is said to be every man's private business ; 
there is nothing fixed in it ; truth is rel- 
ative ; your Christianity is true and mine 
is true, and yet we disagree wofully. 
Religion is made to consist in sympathy 
or feeling ; it is no longer an affair of rea- 
son and will, but imagination. It is the 
poetic sentiment. It is not any longer 
masculine but feminine. It is not for 
men, but for spinsters and tender-heart- 
ed young ladies. Docs not experience 
teach that this is the character of the 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 279 

foshionable pulpit eloquence of our conn, 
try? 

Another proof of the revival of pagan- 
ism is found in the change of sentiment 
manifested toward woman. In ancient 
paganism she was the mere slave of 
man's appetites. She is so in Mohammed- 
anism; and she is becoming so again. 
Modern paganism in appearance exalts 
woman ; it makes her even the superior 
of man ; denies that she should be obe- 
dient to her husband ; opens to her the 
liberal professions, and allows her to 
mount the rostrum or the pulpit. But 
what does this mean ? Does it acknow- 
ledge woman to be man's spiritual help- 
mate, or is it not another way to worship 
sensuality ? Free-loveisni, communism, 
and spiritualism are but the expression 
of modern paganism. It is not through 
real esteem or respect that woman is now 
honored so excessively, but from self- 
love. Men worship their passions in 
this woman-worship. Ancient paganism 



280 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

identified human passions in tlieir gods. 
Jupiter was licentious, and the other di- 
vinities followed his good example. 
Modern paganism is too enlightened to 
worship the old idols, but it hides the 
deformity of its nature under the vail of 
worn an- worship. It lives in " Woman's 
Rights Conventions" and among the 
disciples of spiritualism. Divorce is 
common. The sanctity of marriage is 
despised, and the restrictions of law 
laughed at. The family tie may be sun- 
dered even according to law — law which 
of its very nature ought to mean limit- 
ation and restriction. The Christian 
may, indeed, lead an evil life, but still 
his principles are right. There is always 
hope for his amendment, so long as his 
faith is unhurt. He yields to passions 
more from weakness than from malice; 
he will seldom praise vice, although he 
himself may be vicious. Though the 
flesh may rule him, the spirit is willing 
to acknowledge the truth. But modern 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 281 

paganism erects vice into the dignity of 
a principle. He that gives up his Chris- 
tian faith endeavors to sanction the grati- 
fication of his passions by making ns be- 
lieve that virtue which we hold to be 
vice, and that falsehood which we hold 
to be truth. There is a great difference 
between being bad and having bad 
principles. Few men are as good as 
their good principles; and few are as 
bad as the bad principles which they 
hold. It is principles, good or bad, that 
influence states and individuals. That 
state of man is always the worst when,* 
not content with being wicked himself, 
he endeavors to corrupt others by dis- 
seminating immoral principles in society. 
Hence the first pagans, ignorant as they 
were, and only thinking of gratifying 
the passion of the hour, were far less 
guilty than their enlightened philosophic 
successors, who in cold blood teach im- 
morality in their works of philosophy, 
sugar-coating, as it were, the pill to make 



282 CUEIOUS QUESTIONS. 

its bitterness less sensible. Hence, de- 
praved as were the mobs of the French 
Revolution — the children of modern pa- 
ganism, who worshiped the goddess of 
Reason at Notre Dame — far more heinous 
was the offense of the crowd of philo- 
sophers and writers of the last two cen- 
turies who preached the deification of 
nature and sense in their works. Modern 
paganism, like ancient paganism, is sen- 
sual. Hence it denies virginity to be a 
perfection, and scoffs at celibacy. It 
denies marriage to be a sacrament, and 
hence tends to debase woman. Woman 
under the pagan institutions was merely 
mttuee ov fc&mina; she was for below 
man. Under Christianity she has been 
named mistress and lady. The greatest 
creature that ever existed was a woman. 
Christianity teaches this, and hence the 
dignity of woman is great under the 
Christian law. Now by raising up wo- 
man virtue lias been raised up. AVe 

must learn to respect woman as Chris- 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 283 

tians. We can not look upon her as a 
mere mass of soulless matter, as Moham- 
medanism teaches ; nor make an idol of 
her with modern paganism, which makes 
her an idol to personify sensuality. Nor 
is the exaggerated respect for woman 
manifested by unchristian philosophers 
in our times substantially different from 
the pagan view of the sex. The parti- 
sans of " Woman's Rights" do not defend 
their theories from the fact that they 
really believe woman to be the superior 
or even the equal of man ; but rather be- 
cause, their principles being founded on 
sensuality, they deify woman, who is in 
their eyes the personification of sensual 
delight. It is the same spirit as that 
which put the Goddess of Reason on the 
altar of Notre Dame during the French 
Revolution. There is a mixture of Chris- 
tian respect and pagan brutality in this 
modern apotheosis of woman. And this 
modern paganism which debases, while 
it seems to exalt the dignity of woman, 



284 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

produces the most direful consequences in 
the family, and in the state as well as in 
religion. The daughters are trained up 
in the principles of their parents. Society 
gives us women without virtue and men 
who could not esteem it. In religion 
woman usurps a position that is not hers 
by any law. She mounts the pulpit, and 
men of intelligence and standing in so- 
ciety listen to her, daring to speak 
where good taste and an apostle tell her 
to be silent. She enters the political 
arena, and thousands listen to her. The 
daughters of the land are set an example 
of effrontery in the women lecturers of 
the day. The press, which should be one 
of the guardians of public morality, ap- 
plauds the disgusting spectacle of woman 
throwing away her modesty, the only 
true dignity of her sex. But the press 
could not be expected to do otherwise, 
since it too is infected by modern pagan- 
ism. What is its tone throughout the 
world at fclie present time? As a rule, 



CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 285 

the great organs of public opinion are 
unchristian. They are so in Europe as 
well as in America. They attack re- 
ligion ; preach revolutionism ; ignore the 
laws of eternal justice and truth ; care 
nothing for the observances of Christian 
politeness ; despise charity, and fill the 
country with scandals, falsehoods, and 
disgusting items and obscenities to such 
an extent that no man who cares for the 
morality of his children can in conscience 
permit them the promiscuous reading of 
the newspapers daily published. Nor 
are the weekly magazines better than the 
daily journals. You find sickly senti- 
mentality in most of them ; enervating 
tales if not immoral novels. Yet what 
must the state of society be when we 
consider the immense multitude that de- 
vour daily and weekly the contents of 
such a licentious press ? Is not society 
thoroughly paganized ? Yet we are told 
that there is much natural morality still 
left ; that the great vices are not com- 



286 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

mitted ; that persons are more gentle- 
manly now tlian ever they were. In a 
word, natural religion and morality are 
praised, and persons assert them to be suffi- 
cient for the preservation of order and 
society. Now, as for this natural mo- 
rality, few will be found so deficient in 
judgment as to believe in it. Though 
we know it was an error of the Jan- 
senists to deny the existence of natural 
virtues, and although but one or two sects 
admit " the total depravity" system, still 
in practice and as a matter of fact, we 
feel that little reliance is to be placed 
in human nature bereft of God's grace. 
Man's spiritual nature is very weak. Con 
cupiscence is strong. Let temptations 
' arise, let the occasions present them- 
Bel yes, and how long will natural morality 
stand the siege? And though it may 
stand a longer assault when it lias to con- 
tend with less violent temptations, it will 
certainly fall before greater attacks. If 

Ave ask ourselves, What IS fche cause of 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 287 

modern paganism ? the answer must be, 
self- worship. The tendency to paganize 
every thing grew strongest from the pe- 
riod when men made themselves each the 
judge of his religious belief. 

The family is the groundwork of civil 
society; if the family be Christian, the 
state will be so in like manner ; and if the 
family be corrupt, the state can not remain 
long untarnished. That which gives 
sanctity to the family, and consequently 
strength to civil society, was the Catholic 
sacrament of marriage ; and when the re- 
formers destroyed it, they sowed the seeds 
of revolution in Europe. Revolution in 
the family begets revolution in the state. 
When you allow the separation of man 
and wife, you allow the right of revolu- 
tion in the family, and the state must 
feel the effects of the doctrine. Modern 
paganism may then be laid at the door 
of sectarianism, so much alike are all 
errors, and such is the character of error 
that it must of necessity engender vice. 



288 . CUKIOUS QUESTIONS. 

The influence of all speculative doctrines 
is felt in tlie practical order. Truth 
begets virtue. The true, the good, and 
the beautiful are sisters ; and so are error, 
vice, and deformity. They imply each 
other. Virtue is truth in practice, and 
beauty in its splendor. Vice is the 
legitimate offspring of error. 

Hence the speculative doctrines of 
modern paganism have produced and 
they are producing the most direful results 
in the moral order. As modern paganism 
is falsehood, in contradistinction to Chris- 
tianity, which is truth; so the effects of 
paganism must be immorality, as the 
consequence of Christianity must be 
virtue. Modern paganism, in endeavor- 
ing to destroy Christianity, and in chang- 
ing the principles that govern society, 
lias begotten another excess in regard to 
love of country. It has given birth to 
false patriotism, and tends to make men 
believe that their country is of greater 
importance than either God or religion. 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS/ 289 

There is such a thing as true love of 
country; but it must be Christian in 
order to be true. The country is not an 
idol to be worshiped, but a society to- 
ward which we have duties and obliga- 
tions. All obligations centre in one, 
namely, in that which we have to God, 
as our Creator and supreme Lord. We 
have no obligations to our fellow- 
men only inasmuch as we are bound 
to them by the law of God. Men are 
not the property of the state, for there 
are individual rights as well as state 
rights. True patriotism is the Christian 
love of our neighbor. It is founded on 
the love of family ; for the family is the 
groundwork of civil society. Hence, 
where there is no true love of family, as 
in modern pagan legislation, which admits 
divorce, there can be no true patriotism. 
The patriot begins by loving his parish 
and ends by loving his country. He loves 
his country because he loves his family, 
his birthplace, and his province. He is 



290 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

like the Vendean, " Breton en France, et 
Frangais k l'etranger." Politicians, in 
the modern sense of the word, are not 
true patriots; they are selfish dema- 
gogues actuated by party spirit, not by 
Christian charity. In Sparta, the child- 
ren were the property of the state, and 
the modern system of education tends to 
a similar result. The true theory of 
politics, that is to say, the Christian the- 
ory, puts every thing in its right place, 
in regard to the divine order of things. 
The pagan idea of patriotism does not 
give us true independence, for it sacrifices 
the family and individual rights. Chris- 
tianity defines and limits the rights of 
the temporal without putting them above 
the spiritual; it proclaims the liberty of 
the subject, denounces tyranny, and re- 
sists usurpation. For the pagan, the 
state is all-powerful ; for the Christian, its 
power is subject to reason and a higher 
law. The true Christian only can say, 
" Tu solus Dominus, tu solus altissimus," 



CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 291 

thus teaching a lesson of humility to 
rulers. How far from crouching or ser- 
vility were our good, stout, yet pious 
forefathers ! Modern politics, therefore, 
which make the country an idol, before 
which every right must be sacrificed, are 
also pagan. Paganism, in fine, pervades 
all society, its teachings and its actions. 
In a word, the spirit of the nineteenth 
century is thoroughly pagan. 

How can this spirit be counteracted? 
One great natural means of stemming the 
torrent of pagan ideas is to oblige men 
to exact and serious study. A sound, 
precise course of mental philosophy, in 
collegiate education, in which right prin- 
ciples regarding law and morality would 
be inculcated, could do much toward this 
object. Logic, metaphysics, ethics, and 
aesthetics should be carefully taught and 
deeply studied. But this means is not 
sufficient. It can do something ; it can do 
much ; but not every thing. However 
much we may esteem that great science 



292 CURIOUS QUESTIONS. 

of reason, which we call philosophy ; and 
however much we may appreciate its 
utility, we are conscious of its defects. 
Philosophy alone, reason alone, can not 
put pagan ideas out of society. We must 
have recourse to a supernatural means. 
Experience teaches in the present, as in 
the past, that paganism never yields to 
any force but that of Christian faith. 
You may stagger paganism with a syllo- 
gism, but you can not kill it without the 
sign of the Cross. 



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